OT: Walter Biscardi – Sort Of

[Walter Biscardi]

[John Foley] “I know you have been using Adobe Encore for BluRay projects for some time. I also know that you have not been happy with that product.”

It’s a double edge sword. In some ways I like it more than DVDSP, in other ways, it drives us bananas.

For BluRay it’s the only game in town for the Mac so you have no other choice but to use it. Toast also has some extremely basic menu creation, but it did not impress me what they could do, so we went with Encore.

[John Foley] “I have been asked to turn in a DVCPro-HD project into BluRay. No replication necessary, at this time.

What can you tell me about your experience using Encore? How good or bad is the application for authoring a true BluRay BD or BD-E disc.”

For simple BluRay discs, one menu, one play button, it’s great.

If you get into custom menu creation, it falls apart pretty quickly. Adobe absolutely cannot figure out a very VERY basic button routing issue in the BluRay mode. Button 1 does not route to Button 1, it routes to the last button. Create the same project as a DVD with the same menu, same button routing and Button 1 routes to Button 1.

Adobe has no clue why at the moment but they are “working on it.” We have painstakingly created some workarounds by fooling the software into doing what we want it to do, but you’re talking in the neighborhood of over 100 hours invested in a series of 5 BluRay menus that should have taken 10 hours at the most to program and test.

One thing that is really nuts at the moment is that if you complete a project and then a week later re-open that project, it may or may not work anymore. You might have to rebuild that project from scratch again. Again, Adobe has no clue why other than the fact that the software keeps thinking that we’re creating our projects on Windows for some reason. We don’t do any work on Windows except to run our DVD Duplicator / printer.

The final end product is simply stunning however. We have a series of 5 environmental 30 minute shows that start airing on PBS in July / August and we’re selling all the shows on BluRay and DVD. The BluRay discs look every bit as good as the original HD Masters. Especially the shows from Africa and the Mekong River.

Absolutely positively purchase at least one BD-RE disc for all your testing. We have 5 of them now. I just use the basic Sony non-printable disc for this.

For actual burning, we use the TDK BD-R Printable discs which we buy in a spindle of 25 at a time.

I currently have a Sony BDP-S1 BluRay player with all the latest updates for testing the discs and this week I’ll be picking up a new Samsung 1500 unit that is a new 2.0 spec player to serve as a second test unit.

So far we’ve delivered about 40 or 50 discs and have had zero reports of failures on playback.

Tapeonline.com is where we make all our purchases of disc and tape media. Awesome folks.

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

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[John Foley]

Thanks Walter –

So, you can not successfully make a two menu project; like main menu (one) and chapter menu (two) with several chapter buttons successfully? Does that also mean chapter markers do not import into Encore.

Is there an “end jump” facility in Encore than just doesn’t work or what???

The other amazing statement is the one about not being able to open a project made successfully a week ago??

The app does have a project file- right? Is it that the project file just automatically gets corrupted?

Also, do you use the BluRay encoding output from Compressor in FCP 6 to prepare content for Encore?

Thank you for the answers.

[Walter Biscardi]

[John Foley] “So, you can not successfully make a two menu project; like main menu (one) and chapter menu (two) with several chapter buttons successfully?”

Yes, we have a main menu and chapter menus of 10 – 12 chapters each depending on the shows.

[John Foley] “Does that also mean chapter markers do not import into Encore.”

No, they do not but they are really easy to insert in the Encore timeline.

[John Foley] “The other amazing statement is the one about not being able to open a project made successfully a week ago??
The app does have a project file- right? Is it that the project file just automatically gets corrupted?”

We have no idea what is happening to the project file. Seems to be something to do with Encore thinking that some projects were created with Windows and not Mac. In fact, the first thing Adobe told us when they received our latest project file is “This is a Windows project file.” That’s not possible because we don’t own any Windows software for production. So it’s just “one of those things” right now.

[John Foley] “Also, do you use the BluRay encoding output from Compressor in FCP 6 to prepare content for Encore?”

Yep, we use Compressor for all our media preparation.

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

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[John Foley]

Walter – Thank for the great information.

A final question – i hope — the post concerning Button1 to Button 1 was not about going from one menu to another, rather jumping back to the same button??

Concerning the project file being a Windows project – perhaps their coding sees the Intel Mac as a windows machine because it’s Intel?? Who knows.

You say you have talked to Adobe tech support quite a bit and they have no answers?

I guess we are stuck with Encore as an interum solution because I for one can not spend $300 a month for a new solution like NetBlender’s Do thing as an untested, not understood application and Blueprint is priced out of the little guy’s market.

It will be interesting if Apple gives us a true BluRay – Java based – scriptable solution clothed in pretty clothes solution.

Thanks again for the help.

[Walter Biscardi]

[John Foley] “A final question – i hope — the post concerning Button1 to Button 1 was not about going from one menu to another, rather jumping back to the same button??”

It’s complicated but if you set up your menu so that the first button to appear activated is Button 1, it won’t. It will generally be the last button. When you come back to the Chapter Menu, it will not automatically default to the last chapter you had selected, it will always default to the last button (last chapter) in the menu.

[John Foley] “You say you have talked to Adobe tech support quite a bit and they have no answers?”

Not tech support, we’re dealing directly with the Encore project leader and the development team.

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

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[Randy Lee]

Actually, I created a Blu-Ray disc recently (My first, and what an experience!) and didn’t have any problems forcing the selection of the buttons. (It was easier than the old Sonic software on an OS 9 machine that we use for the rest of our DVDs. If you’d like, I can double check from work tomorrow and give you a step-by-step on how I did it.) Encore was, as Walter says, better than DVDSP in some ways, and much worse in others. I would advise testing a video with menus out before it comes down to the paying job with deadlines, so you know what you’re getting into and what you’ll need to watch for.

The biggest issue I ran into was that for some reason, it would never build a complete project if I just tried to build. I had to file > save as [new project name], and then it would build fine every time, if I didn’t change anything. The minute something gets changed, it wouldn’t build anymore.

The other huge issue that I ran into was that our discs will play in a PS3, but we tried it out in every Blu-Ray player at the local Best Buy, and another player that we bought (with the most recent firmware update), and the PS3 is the only thing that we could play anything back.

At the end of the day, though, it was amazing seeing our footage played back in its full HD glory. Its worth learning the needlessly difficult workflow just for that.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Randy Lee] “The other huge issue that I ran into was that our discs will play in a PS3, but we tried it out in every Blu-Ray player at the local Best Buy, and another player that we bought (with the most recent firmware update), and the PS3 is the only thing that we could play anything back.”

They MUST have the latest firmware updates or they will not play back BD-R discs. These came out about 2 months ago for just about all the players. I’m sure Best Buy does not update anything once it’s on the show floor. They just play commercial BD-R discs.

We just purchased a new Samsung 1500 BluRay player as it’s one of the first with the 2.0 features on it. Our BD-R’s play just fine in there. They also work in our original Sony BDP-S1 player after it was updated with the firmware back in December or January, right after Sony’s BD-R discs started shipping.

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

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

[Randy Lee]

That’s sort of what I was afraid of. The company I’m with bought the cheapest player they could find, although supposedly it has the latest firmware update as of the beginning of June. The only other place I could go to check them out was Best Buy and similar stores. Those didn’t work, but they did play in a PS3, and I don’t know of anyone else with another BluRay player to test them out in. Here in the midwest, though, not many people have BluRay players anyway, and most of the people with them are most likely not going to know how to update the firmware, so until (if?) they ship ready to play BD-Rs out of the box, we’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. “Yes, of course we can give you an HD copy. You just won’t be able to play it without jumping through some hoops…”

On a side note, is there any particular reason that you use Encore instead of DVDIT Pro? Convenience? Other issues? We’ve got a copy laying around, and if that would be less buggy than Encore, it would be worth installing it somewhere and learning it.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Randy Lee] “Here in the midwest, though, not many people have BluRay players anyway, and most of the people with them are most likely not going to know how to update the firmware, so until (if?) they ship ready to play BD-Rs out of the box, we’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. “Yes, of course we can give you an HD copy. You just won’t be able to play it without jumping through some hoops…””

Updating firmware is very simple. All BluRay players come with instructions on how to do this. Everyone will have to do this anyway as the newer BluRays come out with new features. The features won’t work without the updates.

[Randy Lee] “On a side note, is there any particular reason that you use Encore instead of DVDIT Pro? Convenience? Other issues? We’ve got a copy laying around, and if that would be less buggy than Encore, it would be worth installing it somewhere and learning it.”

Encore works on the Mac. that’s the only reason we went with it.

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

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