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Encore Success Story
I just wanted to give a head’s up and thank you to this forum for the success I had last night creating my first Blu-ray disk using Encore CS4 and Toast 10.
I have had the hardware and software to burn Blu-ray for some time but didn’t need to until last night. I have spent a lot of time over the last several months reading, asking questions, and educating myself on creating a Blu-ray using Final Cut Pro, Compressor, Adobe Encore, and Toast 10. I read about all the horror stories, the negative backlash about the Encore software, the issues people have had, and the few successes. All I can say is that it worked for me, the first time, having never touched the software until last night, without any real problems, with more than just a play button. I attribute this to the lessons I have learned here, what to avoid, and what to look for.
Here is a quick run-down of what I created:
I opened Adobe Encore CS4 for the first time at 9:00pm last night. I had already created the correct MPEG-2 Program stream and AC3 file from Compressor which was created in Final Cut Pro using an XDCAM EX 29.97 timeline. I imported the asset, picked a static HD menu, and proceeded to create the disk. I first created chapter marks in the timeline and then created my main menu and first sub menu. The main menu had 4 buttons and the sub menus each had 10 buttons (8 chapter buttons and 2 buttons for navigation to other menus). I ended up making minor changes in Photoshop to the menus (adding my own background text and duplicating buttons) but changing the names of the buttons in Encore. I know I could have done that in Photoshop but I wanted to play it safe. I then linked the buttons in Encore to the correct chapters and menus. I remembered reading somewhere that Encore needs to have the audio and video the exact same length so I had to trim my audio track 1 frame at the end because it was 1 frame longer than the video. I then built the disk image. 1.5 hours later, the image was complete and I proceeded to use Toast 10 to burn the project to my Sony 200-S Blu-ray burner.
This is where the only hiccup of the experience came in. I kept getting an error reading “Could not prepare the track for writing” from Toast. Upon a google search, I found that this error usually refers to communication problems with the burner. The problem turned out to be that the external chassis my associate purchased for the typically internal Sony Blu-ray drive, had the SATA adapted to an IDE card, and then to firewire or USB. I was connected firewire to my 8 core MacPro with 16GB of Ram. All I did was take the Sony blu-ray burner out of it’s external chassis and put it into a different chassis with just a SATA to USB adapter and connected USB to my computer and it burned perfectly. By 1:30am, I was done and tested the disk in my Sony 300 set top blu-ray player. It worked great. The chapters and menus all worked great. I’ve yet to find something other than what I designed.
Granted, this project was a single track of video but it did have multiple menus with many buttons. However, it worked perfectly and was exactly what I needed for my customers. Now that I have seen this work for myself, I am going to try some different things and I will let you all know how it turns out. However, my little 4.5 hour experience was a lot less than what I thought it would be reading on this forum. I’m sure that this must have just been a fluke but I’ll take what I can get.
Andrew
Andrew S. Golden
President
Illusion Media LLC -
4 Replies
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I have created a complete video tutorial on authoring a Blu-ray/DVD disc in Encore, using a workflow that avoids many of the bugs with the program, and integrates multiple custom motion menus, chapter indexes, seamless menu transitions, blu-ray pop-up menus, and more.
It was designed to be used with our Pro Motion Menu Kit products, but is helpful to everyone, and freely available. Here is the link:
https://www.precomposed.com/blog/2009/05/encore-tutorial/
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com -
Thanks for the info. I will be sure to take a look at it.
Andrew
Andrew S. Golden
President
Illusion Media LLC -
Jon,
Sorry to bother you, but I can’t find the BluRay tutorial on your web site. Would you please point me to it. Thanks,
John RichJOHNR
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As the blog post describes, it is found in the tutorial section of the website under the “Product Tutorials”. Clicking on the Encore tutorial for any of our products will do, as they all use the same one.
For example, here is the link to the Encore tutorial for our Butterfly Bliss Pro Motion Menu Kit:
https://www.precomposed.com/tutorials/products/01_butterfly_bliss/en.html
Jon Geddes
http://www.precomposed.com
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