Fastest way to export from Final Cut to BluRay

[Don Greening]

The latest version of Compressor has a setting specifically for Blu-ray encoding, either MPEG2 or H.264 which are the 2 Blu-ray standards. If you wish you can then burn your BD-R on a Mac using Toast 10 (and a 3rd party Blu-ray burner).

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/taming_the_wild_blu.html

– Don

[Aaron Porteous]

How fast does it typically compress using Compressor?

[Tom Wolsky]

I must have missed it but I didn’t see anything in Bruce’s article about using Compressor for this. It looks like it’s all Toast all the way.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP6,” “Basic Training for FCS2” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Aaron Porteous]

Does Toast work faster than Compressor? I’m trying to crunch down the time for doing same-day turnaround in HD. My videos are 2hrs long, and I’d like to get the compression down to 2hrs as well if possible. Overnight compressing is killing me. I could do it with Standard Definition footage.

[Don Greening]

[Tom Wolsky] “I must have missed it but I didn’t see anything in Bruce’s article about using Compressor for this.”

In Compressor when you choose an MPEG2 preset, in the Inspector’s Encoder tab there’s a drop down menu beside “Stream Usage.” Your choices are:

Generic
SD DVD
Blu-ray
HD DVD

Compressor is supposed to be better for encoding than Toast® so people are using Compressor then bringing the audio and video elements into Toast® for burning.

Towards the end of part 2 of Bruce’s article he states this:

“Encoding for Blu-ray
Toast allows you to use un-encoded .MOV files as the video source for your Blu-ray Video Disc, but the video must be encoded into the proper format for use in a finished Blu-ray Disc. Once you initiate the burn, Toast will encode each video clip you authored, using the settings you provided earlier in the Options panel and Settings window. (If you are using video streams already encoded to the proper specs, this step might be skipped).”

– Don

[Aaron Porteous]

So how fast does it compress? How long should it generally take to compress 2hrs of HD video?

[Chris Borjis]

[Aaron Porteous] “So how fast does it compress? How long should it generally take to compress 2hrs of HD video?”

720P or 1080i?

do you have virtual clustering on with a quad or octo core system?

those both make a HUGE difference.

the fastest way to get it into compressor is to export it from
final cut pro as an uncompressed 8 or 10-bit quicktime (if you have enough room for it).

you can use ProRes too but it will take longer since its VBR compression.

expect your system to take 2-4 times longer than your video to compress
it into mpeg2 for blu-ray on a dual G5 system with 4gb ram.

mpeg4/H.264 you can forget about unless you don’t mind waiting a few days.

[Walter Biscardi]

We use Compressor to create our MPEG-2 files for BluRay disc. You do not want to use H.264 at this time as it’s a big issue.

Just export a reference file from FCP. Open it in Compressor and create the appropriate MPEG-2 for BluRay disc. We’ve authored about 25 discs so far and the quality from Compressor far exceeds the quality for the standard DVD compressions. It pretty much looks like the original HD timeline.

For authoring we use Adobe Encore for no menu or “play button” only BluRay discs as it’s useless for anything beyond that. I don’t use Toast for authoring at all, just for burning the ISO files sometimes.

For full menu functionality we use NetBlender’s DoStudio which is a Windows only application. We’re running it on an HP workstation. The MPEG-2’s created in Compressor work perfectly in this app too.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

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[Walter Biscardi]

[Tom Wolsky] “I must have missed it but I didn’t see anything in Bruce’s article about using Compressor for this. It looks like it’s all Toast all the way. “

Nope, Compressor works fine for BluRay disc, that’s all we’ve been using for the past 19 months for all our BluRay compression. Works surprisingly well.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[Aaron Porteous]

We are using HDV 1080p30. How do you set up virtual clustering?

Thanks so much. Does more than 4g ram make more of a difference? Or is 4gb all you need. Just wondering where the math is. Got a Quad core G5, but it’s an old one. We’re looking at upgrading, just not sure what to get.

Exporting from fcp as quicktime first is faster than compressing straight from fcp to compressor?