[Andrew Ford]

I second the quality of the LaCie d2 external Blu-ray drive, especially if you work on a Mac.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/602325-REG/LaCie_301856U_d2_Blu_ray_Drive.html

I have authored over 50 Blu-ray discs with this drive since getting it in Jan and I’ve had no problems. I use the FW400 connection and the burn time is fast. The portability is great when I’m on the road. I’ve used TDK, Verbatim, and Sony discs, both BD-R and BD-RE, 25 and 50gb, and no problems across the board. Letting Encore transcode can be painfully slow, so I use Sorenson instead to get a better result in a little less time.

[Andrew Ford]

I find Encore CS4 doesn’t like files encoded from Compressor. Last Fall, I spoke to an “engineer” at Adobe and he asked me to tell him step-by-step what I did in compressor and the settings used to make the .m2v. Afterwards, he said those steps were correct and was unsure why it wasn’t working. Most of the time, when you bring in an .m2v from Compressor, you will see in the Project window under “Blu-ray transcode status” that the file is being read as “Untranscoded.” The “transcode settings” window never seems to offer an option to leave the file alone when it is a Compressor .m2v. Maybe I am missing something as to why it’s not working with the above workflow, but there are plenty of other ways to do this so I haven’t spent more time figuring out why.

Any movies I compress for Blu-ray with other software (like Sorenson Squeeze) work fine when imported into Encore. I like Sorenson anyway compared to Compressor because I have more control over more options.

One option if you don’t have additional compression software is to let Encore do the transcoding. I’ve let Encore do this with various source material (such as mographs out of AE with animation codec, or raw footage right off the Sony XDCAM HD) with either mpeg-2 or h.264 compression, and it’s worked pretty well on high quality settings.