FCP & Toast 11 Pro won’t burn Blu-ray disc

[Brad Wright]

Try making a Blu-ray with compressor. I’ve had problems with my blu-ray burner which I bought from https://mcetech.com/ It still doesn’t read DVDs correctly, but with compressor I was able to burn Blu-ray disks. I wrote MCE about the problem, but they never resolved it. If Plextor doesn’t resolve the issue, send the Blu-ray recorder back. I would not recommend using Toast for encoding anything. The H.264 encoder leaves lots of digital artifacts while Apple’s compressor looks much better.

Brad Wright is software engineer, so it may be difficult to understand what he is saying. He is always happy to explain his greater detail.

[Douglas Farrelly]

Hi Brad

Thanks for your advice.

Earlier today after reading some posts I decided to use compressor, that said It’s still H.264 and it’s estimated to take almost 10 hours to compress 🙁

I didn’t realise that H.264 encoding leaves lots of digital artefacts, something I will be watching out for in the future.

What’s the work flow you use when burning Blu-ray or what settings do you think I should use to get the best quality, I don’t mind how long it takes to do as the quality has to be as good as I can get it.

I really appreciate your help!!
Dougie

[Rafael Amador]

I agree with Brad point.
That kind of errors normally comes from the media or the burner or a kind of combination of both.
As you have tried with different kind of disks I think you should try another burner.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Brad Wright]

Yes, I’ve done some test encodings with Toast and video has been full of digital artifacts. Compressor does take time to encode H.264, however it does the very best H.264 encode job I’ve seen so far. It properly encodes interlaced video to H.264, as well. Usually, I just leave compressor running overnight. Matrox sells a the MXO with MAX which allows for much faster H.264 encoding. I haven’t tried this yet, but I would certainly look into a hardware encoding option if I needed to do a lot of Blu-ray disks.

Brad Wright is software engineer, so it may be difficult to understand what he is saying. He is always happy to explain his greater detail.

[Douglas Farrelly]

Hi Rafael

Thanks a mill for your response.

What confuses me is that the burner is brand new and it burns DVDs no problem.

I’ve contacted Plextor about this situation and unfortunately they haven’t responded. I think a trip back to where I bought it is in order!
Dougie

[Douglas Farrelly]

Should I keep going with compressor for the H.264 encode and then use toast to burn the Blu-ray or should I use some other encoding software?

[Brad Wright]

Yes, I would go use compressor to encode and Toast to burn the final version.

Brad Wright is software engineer, so it may be difficult to understand what he is saying. He is always happy to explain his greater detail.

[Chris Borjis]

Make sure you go into the toast options and tell it not to re-encode if you have not already.

Also, your compressor setup should have virtual clustering turned on, that can dramatically decrease the encode time.

If you compress with mpeg2 which looks just fine at blu-ray bitrates that will also reduce the encoding time.

[Chris Babbitt]

I use Toast 10 to burn blu-rays all the time, but I don’t use h.264. Instead, I make an MPeg-2 file in Compressor. Don’t look under DVD settings. Instead, go to Formats/Mpeg-2/Elementary Stream. Be sure to select Blu-Ray in the “Stream Usage” window. Take that into Toast, along with your audio file, and make sure you check “Re-Encode Never.” MP2 makes bigger files than H.264, but will be fine for a 2-hour movie.
I have a Pioneer burner.

[Chris Tompkins]

You didn’t mention the size of your files in the original post?
Are you sure they fit? (thinking of the error)

Are you using BD-R 25GB?

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC