[Ben Holmes]

John

It sounds as if you want to produce a DVD-ROM with multiple video files on it. Not a DVD-Video disk.

Am I right? You’ll never get the high quality of the original videos from DVD Video…

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Walter

Here’s a quick rundown of my first Blu-Ray build. Like others here, I would guess, I am a FCP user who bought Premiere Pro just for Encore. I read it was the only professional authoring solution for Mac available.

I have built a simple disc with 3 menus. Start, Chapters, Special Features. Start has 3 buttons, Chapters 8, Special features 5.

I built the whole disc as blu-ray, simulated it and checked it. I was impressed by the ease of building and testing in Encore. Although it lacks the pizzaz of DVD-SP, it does the basics well IMHO.

Having build an HD project, I let Encore build me a SD DVD of it. I expected some problems, as the disc was built as 23.98p from a 24p master and then sent to DVD as 29.97.

Apart from the encodes taking ages (overnight and then some for 1.5 hrs footage) I was impressed that the disc worked in SD first time. The picture quality was excellent. The Dolby surround track was in place. All was well in the world.

Then I tried to burn the Blu Ray. That was 2 days ago. I’m still here.

The problem for me can be summarised as follows: My buttons do not appear. They are the sort of buttons that have ‘no’ unselected state. In other words, you only see them when they are selected. I needed to do this, as I built motion backgrounds for the menus in motion, and the text for the buttons animates on – so the buttons cannot be visible until selection is possible at the loop point.

I think most of the navigation is working, although with invisible buttons (which – BY THE WAY – aren’t invisible in the simulator) it’s pretty hard to tell. The video is all there and looks fine. I think I have the same issues others have reported with the disk not starting menus on the right button – but I can’t be sure.

I should say at this point that after one failure attempting to burn straight to disc, I now output an ISO and burn in toast. This has not failed once in all my attempts to burn an ISO to my internal Pioneer BD-202 drive, which appeared plug-and-play in OSX when I connected it to the internal SATA ports.

I have built a test menu from my main project and inserted various stock buttons from Encore. About half of them work properly when burnt. When I tried to modify one so I could use it in place of my own buttons it again failed to appear where required.

Even more frustratingly, everytime I try to fix the buttons and re-build the ISO, Encore starts re-encoding ALL the video in the project, even though it shows up as rendered in the project window. This means each test takes hours to complete. I am running out of hours.

As of now, I am frazzled, fed up and out of time to deliver. I can accept that I may have made some error in my build (although I have tried unaltered stock buttons, and many do not work in Blu-Ray) I cannot accept that it works IN THE SIMULATOR AND NOT ON THE DISK.

I had my client around yesterday and I had to show him the problems. He pointed out that as a games developer, they had FREE software at their office for making Blu-Rays on PC that did all this – making menus etc. with no problems. I may have to give him the videos as QTs and let them build it. Frankly, that makes me feel sick.

As soon as I have found ANY solution to this build, I will be attempting to return Encore for a full refund. I’m sure it will not be an easy process. But here’s the truth of it: For a simple Blu-Ray disk, Encore DOES NOT WORK as it should – because what it shows me in the simulator and what it burns to disk are two different things. End of story.

Adobe have lost my custom long term over this – it’s inexcusable.

More to follow.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

It’s just not sensible to add more devices to the same bus – at a certain point you will just slow down access to the drives. Invest in something safer (RAID 5 or similar) and cheaper (without multiple enclosures) like an eSata array. I use 2 G-Tech G-Speed ES as one 8 drive RAID 5 array. 4 TB, and fast enough for uncompressed 2K…

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Alexander

Go with what your colourist suggests – the SD captions will appear as smaller (relative to frame size) HD captions, removing your safe area problems. If it’s for projection, chances are the captions will not need to be as big as they were in SD anyway. If you need to shift them, do it in the motion tab for one, and then paste motion attributes for all the others. Keep moves to whole even numbers in motion tab (X and Y values).

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Walter

I’m new to Encore (mmm – blu-ray hell) but I had the same error message after I tried to open a COPY of a project. I just duplicated it in the finder and got this message

Don’t know if that helps – makes no sense to me… I tried to copy it after the original project crashed encore every time I opened it.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

That’s true Steven, but you have to apply that look to all your selected shots in the log and transfer window. That does not allow you to quickly view each shot in turn and make small/large adjustments as required. Further, if you want 1080p files from the RED originals, at present you will not get the exact frame size required – it’s a fudge until the QuadHD option is enabled in build 17 of the camera firmware.

As much as I appreciate the speed of the L&T option, it does not do the RED footage the justice that REDCine does yet – I wish it did…

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Zee

DVD compression (Mpeg2) is pretty poor quality, so graphics usually suffer. This is particularly the case with smaller text or thin fonts.

I would recommend that you try a different size or font to improve the DVD output – it can make a real difference.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Hi Joel

I’m working on these kinds of RED projects from time to time, and I use ProRes HQ as my codec of choice for RED finishing. To be fair, often there’s other formats in the mix as well, so capturing those via SDI as ProRes gives me just one type of file to deal with throughout.

1080p24 ProRes files look great, and you should still at this time do this via REDCine – the L&T option does not give you the shot by shot control over your one-light colour correction, nor the reframing options that are so nice when shooting 4K video. You can also CC with curves, which is not yet possible using REDAlert and L&T as far as I know.

My biggest concern with what you mention is that you seem to suggest using a MacBook Pro for rendering. I would strongly advise against this. Using a MacPro, and setting the export settings sensibly in REDCine (for example using full rather than maximum quality and so on) you can get transcode times down to between 8 and 4:1. You will not get anywhere near that on a MacBook Pro – not will you get a good quality (say half-size) preview in REDCine. On a MBP your transcode ratio may be as high as 20-40:1.

Use a MacBook Pro with an eSata CF card reader and a RAID 1 drive (mirrored data) to transfer data off the cards. Regularly transfer this to an internal RAID array or RAID 1/5 external array on the Mac Pro. One light on the Mac Pro using a calibrated cinema display – then for good measure have an HD monitor and SDI output on the Mac Pro if you can swing it to check the REDCine outputs with proper gamma. This HD monitor can be used by the camera operator and DP/Director as an on-set reference monitor for shooting anyway.

Personally, I get my cards backed up (twice) on set then do the transfers at base, so your requirements are obviously different. I would still recommend a Mac Pro for the transcodes – you could have it cased for transport then set up as easily as a MBP unless you are really in a remote location…

Hope that helps a little.

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

check your settings. Have you got ‘play base layer only’ checked in the RT drop-down top left of the timeline? Check the render settings also in system settings….

Ben

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[Ben Holmes]

Thanks to both of you – I’m in conversation with a number of the above. It’s much appreciated.

Ben

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