Is Anyone Authoring BluRay?

[Michael Slowe]

I’m putting HD productions to Blu-Ray and DVD. For Blu-Ray a stand alone Lacie burner into the MacPro and encoding, burning etc in Titanium Toast 10 (with BD plug-in). For DVD’s encoding in BitVice, Formatting in DVDSP, burning in Toast. All from a finished HD timeline in Media 100.

Michael Slowe

[Michael Sacci]

The poster needs to state what level of “authoring” he needs to do.

Compressor, Encore and Toast all can do a preview level of BluRay but no real authoring as you would expect on a replicated disc. For that the only inexpensive program is DoStudio’s Netblender (https://www.netblender.com/main/buy/pricing-information/) Which starts at $4K if you get the encoder software. It is also a PC only program, but can be run in BootCamp.

[Dave Haynie]

Not on the MacOS platform, but I do this in Sony Vegas/DVD Architect… have been doing so since 2008.

The great thing here is that one authored production in DVDA can be targeted to either Blu-ray or DVD with minor changes. On the downside, the program doesn’t currently allow access to more advanced Blu-ray features… their Blu-ray model makes Blu-ray a slightly more capable (mostly) DVD that can be done in HD, AVC or MPEG-2 (no support for VC-1 at the moment… but well, this is Sony). Audio options are PCM and AC-3, none of the new high-definition compression formats, but I’ve found that perfectly adequate for my work.

Adobe Encore seems to the be the go-to application for full Blu-ray authoring on the MacOS. This also supports BD and DVD authoring in a single project, and something Adobe calls “WebDVD”, which is apparently a Flash framework (which I’m sure Apple loves to no end, given their campaign to kill of Flash). I have not used Encore… I know people who think it’s a dandy program.

-Dave