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First Time Blu-ray Design Tips/Tricks?
Hi All,
So we’ve just been tasked with our very first Blu-ray at the studio I work for. We have already locked and completed the DVD using DVD Studio Pro (and are using a Final Cut Studio workflow) and were originally stopping there. However the client has decided he wants to go the HD route as well and so now we are hoping to translate our DVD menu design into a Blu-Ray menu design.
Are there any tips/tricks people can offer for us first time Blu-ray authors? I’ve never used Encore but am willing to learn. The plan is to simply take our original DVD Menu Design and re-create it in 1080 for Blu-ray but my concern is that most of the blu-rays I own function a little differently than DVDs (pop up menus, and the like) and I know that even Criterion has special Blu-ray designs that differ greatly from their DVD menu designs.
Any help/guidance that can be offered would be greatly appreciated. I’m sure I’ll have more specific questions as we get deeper into this, but even being pointed to a simple tutorial (be it text or video) on the basics of Blu-Ray menu creation would be greatly appreciated (my googling so far has come up rather bust)
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3 Replies
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Like you’ve notice, BDs and DVD are different in how the menus are set up and designed. In fact, you can’t really compare the 2 since they are completely different technologies. Dont let the fact they both end up on tiny flat discs fool you 🙂
I cant give you any tip or tricks on Encore but I can say its a very buggy and limited piece of software for BD. The titles you own weren’t done on Encore. Encore is fine for one offs for the client but its not something you want to be using if you plan on replicating 1000s of copies for retail.
Personally I think you should send this out of house to an individual or company that does BD work. You will also need to consider moving over to 1 of 3 tools to do the work: Do Studio, Scenarist or Blu Print. In a Nutshell, taking on the job of this BD project, if you plan to replicate or come close to the quality and functionality of store bought titles, will set you back $5K to 70K…..not to mention the weeks or months of getting over the learning curve and testing your workflows.
Here’s an article which goes over each:
https://magazine.creativecow.net/writer/eric-pautsch
I would get these books first to learn about the technology. You dont want to be doing work for a client without an understand of whats inside the BDMV folder youre providing.
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Alan,
as Eric described, there are several issues that comes with blu-ray. but if you are willing to learn and spend some time you´ll might be able to author professional BDs.but this would definitelly wont work with encore.
if you (or you company) looking for software that could handle professional blu-rays I would look at DVD-Logic EasyBD-Suite.
https://www.dvd-logic.com/easybd/
It´s worth the price and you can create professional BDs.
if you need to create replication-masters, you also need to get blustreak tracer CMF (as EasyBD couldn´t create it):
https://rivergatesoftware.com/blustreaktracercmf
so you´ll get a complete working suite for less than 1.5k$
cheers
danny
NOTE: be awared of the significant work on the Interactive-Graphic Stream 😉
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Yeah….I always forget about Logics software :). Good call
Significant learning curved with the IG editor for sure
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