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Toast and Blue ray (simple DVD)
It sounds like you can use compressor to make the Blue Ray Mpeg2 files. My question is, can you use toast to make a simple first play (no menu) Blue ray dvd?
Second question. Can you add a still picture or video (in toast) to use as a background for a menu or are you stuck with cheezy stock menus.
Mike
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11 Replies
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Yes, you can use Compressor – but… Toast will re-encode it anyway. I’ve had decent results with just dragging a ProRes quicktime into the Toast “authoring” screen (ha!), and letting it to the encode. (Toast has an option for “Re-Encode – always, never, auto” but I haven’t been able to get Toast to recognize the Compressor BR MPEG-2 file as blu-ray ready, so it always re-encodes it on me.)
BUT – it will encode everything to 1080i 29.97 or 720p59.94 – 1080p24 quicktimes will get frames duplicated, which is noticeable on slow dollies, pans, etc…
You can change the background screen (Stills, no video), and choose a frame of video for the thumbnail on the menu button, but you’re stuck with choosing from their cheesy preset buttons. And you can choose auto-play, so it can skip the menu screen entirely if you want it to.
For me, Toast has been fine for presenting rough cuts, etc.. in HD, but I wouldn’t think of it as a tool capable of authoring/mastering client deliverable Blu-Rays.
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I second the above. I have also not been able to keep Toast from re-encoding my MPEG-2 files and Roxio Support has been ignoring my e-mails.
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Does toast do a good job of encoding your prores files? Is the image quality where it should be?
Mike
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It’s decent, especially if you give it 1080i material. Like I mentioend before, 1080p24 material will duplicated every fourth frame to get it to 30 fps.
When Toast 8 was released, it’s MP4 encoding never worked, or at least, wouldn’t playback on our player, but in Toast 9, the “auto-encode” preset works surprisingly well, and it can do MPEG-2 or MP4, and you can even tinker with the bit rates if you want to.
I have had a few errors when it tries to encode something with single frame edits, but for the most part, it’s OK for making VERY simple DVDs.
Some things are completely frustrating, like all of the thumbnail buttons are 4:3, even in the 16:9 menus. Come on, ROXIO, how hard would that be to fix? But for $100, and 5 minutes to learn it, it’s not bad – at least if you can live with the iDVD like menu options.
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So all you have to do to encode is import the SCM (self contained movie)into toast and create the blue ray disc?
Does the SCM out of FCP need to be a prores file or can it be any format?
Mike
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Yes, it’s really simple. For the menus, I basically just picked out the least obnoxious button style, change the background to our company logo, drag in the QTs, choose thumbnail images and a name each clip, and click BURN. It will also allow you to burn to a 4.3GB DVD-R, but playback compatibility is quite sketchy. Our Panasonic player reads them just fine, but on a PS3, the playback stutters if the bitrate is over 6.0 Mbps – at which point you might as well just downres and make a standard def DVD.
It can be any quicktime format, (within reason – I would stick to the editing formats, no H264’s, etc. It would probably do it, but the triple encode would degrade the image quality substantially.)
And HDV, since it’s already MPEG-2, would probably suffer from another re-encode.
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[David Jahns] “And HDV, since it’s already MPEG-2, would probably suffer from another re-encode.”
Well, I can tell you that Toast worked absolute wonders with XDCAM HD 1080p24 to Blu-Ray.
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com -
Well, that’s good to know.
Did you export an XDCAM format quicktime, or was it XDCAM source footage, rendered out to ProRes? Did you notice any frame stutters from the duplicated frames? Or did you figure out how to make Toast encode at 24 fps?
One of the other problems on the Mac is that we have no way to look at the raw file on the BR-disc once it’s encoded, so I’ve sometimes had trouble figuring out what Toast was doing during the encode. One an SD-DVD, you can open up the .VOB file and check it frame by frame – i haven’t figured out a way to do that with the BR discs yet.
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One of the big problems with letting Toast do the encode is that it takes about twice as long as Compressor–about 5.5 times the length of your program. It will import your chapter stops from FCP, but the menu items will have numbers instead of names, and you can’t change them.
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[David jahns] “Did you export an XDCAM format quicktime, or was it XDCAM source footage, rendered out to ProRes?”
Straight XDCAM HD format, no conversion at all.
[David jahns] “Did you notice any frame stutters from the duplicated frames?”
None that I saw. And the feature was a full 90 minutes.
[David jahns] “Or did you figure out how to make Toast encode at 24 fps?
“I have to assume that it encodes the same frame rate that it is given.[David jahns] “One of the other problems on the Mac is that we have no way to look at the raw file on the BR-disc once it’s encoded, so I’ve sometimes had trouble figuring out what Toast was doing during the encode. One an SD-DVD, you can open up the .VOB file and check it frame by frame – i haven’t figured out a way to do that with the BR discs yet.”
This is why you use BD-RW discs. If your project fails, you erase the disc and try again.
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com
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