[Drew Lahat]

Yikes, this was featured in Cow’s big email blast and no one replied?

What good is it talking about MC 2018 and a 2013 MP, when the OP has a Mac Studio? Studios cannot ever run the 2018 version.

Trevor, I recommend the latest version, 2024.2. Or 2022.12, it also seems to be quite stable for us. I manage many, many Avids at our facility, including many on the Studio M1. We actually have many machines on 2023.12 but it’s been so-so.

As for the OS, you got it backwards… Big Sur is the oldest, not the latest. Not much difference between them all, except that Ventura changed the system preferences and now no one can find any settings. 😉 But we live in Apple’s world, there’s no choice… Go for Ventura (not Sonoma), because it will give you macOS security updates for another 1.5 years.

[Drew Lahat]

“ALL Hardware from Apple shipping with Catalina Pre-installed will NOT be able to boot or run on macOS Systems prior to Catalina !!!!”

Exactly… Apple basic truths, goes back to my days as a Mac technician when the Intel cheesegrater came out: Macs cannot be used with an OS older than the one they have shipped with.

[Drew Lahat]

“In addition there are only 2 i/o ports (both Thblt 3) built into the system”

You can use those as USB ports, no? For example with this $8 cable:
https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Type-C-Micro-B-Gen2-Cable/dp/B01GGKYIHS

[Drew Lahat]

So… can we saw off the bottom of the top cover? ????

Any reason why on earth they designed it this way, with that little bar making the entire difference between having to disconnect everything to troubleshoot hardware, and not having to?

Absolutely great point about the futility of having a top cover when the most common scenario is placing the computer under a desk… Sonnet or OWC could fabricate a replacement cover with detachable side doors. ☺ The easier, realistic solution is to properly cable-manage, ensuring you’ve got 3 feet of slack tied and coiled neatly behind the machine so you can slide it out easily. (Oh and add $4 furniture glider or felt pads to those feet if you don’t have carpet. Or buy those $400 wheels.)

Finally, does the rackmount version allow removing the cover without disconnecting everything? And how does it handle what would be accessing the bottom of the computer, when laid horizontally?

[Drew Lahat]

Sorry I didn’t see this thread 3 weeks ago. ☺

I run a full small post-house “facility” and I have a few clients for whom authoring reliable, quality BluRay’s and DVD’s is a requirement. It took a lot of research to come up with a solution that works for me.
My advice:

1. Forget about finding a “good” solution, you’re gonna have to make do with what’s available and what works for you. I think that if you’re this picky about Toast’s nagging upselling tactics, you’re never gonna end up with any solution. ???? From what you shared, I think they’re bad form, but hardly a dealbreaker. There are bigger concerns.
In all likelihood, forget about finding a good solution without a virtual machine to run Windows on, or even investing in a PC or old Mac, if your authoring work needs justify it.

2. My basic requirements include strong support for subtitles. I think that after 18(!) versions it’s a bit of a joke that Toast hasn’t developed that capability, which sets apart “authoring” software from disc burners that can ‘also make video discs’. That said, I can’t live without Toast. ☺ It runs on Mac, and does an automatic verification pass, which some other tools shockingly lack. So I use Toast all the time, but only to burn the complete image files of my authored discs.

3. DVD Architect: Unfortunately, my experience was drastically different than Jeff’s. It crashed more than any other authoring software I tried, and another dealbreaker for me was that it couldn’t import SUP files nor subtitle bitmaps. Point is, your own mileage may vary – whether you read Jeff’s opinion, mine, or the Toast reviews.

4. Encore CS6: I’m not sure what’s the state of Encore’s availability, but it’s a love-hate thing. Some features make it very convenient, but it can be buggy as hell. And for me, the stupid requirement for 5-frame gaps between BluRay subtitles was a dealbreaker. Also, you’ll need an emulator anyway to run it (like Parallels, to run an old OS X in a virtual machine inside your Mac), so at that point you might as well use Windows.

5. Apple DVD Studio Pro: An excellent, legit, powerful authoring software – for DVD’s only. ☹ Will require older OS X in a VM.

6. TMPGEnc Authoring Works: This is actually my recommendation to try. Weird interface, but it is quite capable. Tbh I tried it and had too many bugs, but their support team seemed willing to work on them. Will require Windows in a VM.

7. So what do I use? Encore and DVD Studio Pro for DVDs (with some cursing), and for BluRays…. tsMuxerGUI (!) with a smattering of hacky Windows apps (in a VM) to help it work. There’s a build that runs natively on Mac, it “eats” BluRay H264 files from Adobe without reencoding (which is a big deal), and is super fast. The downside? It’s not an “authoring software” as per the above definition, forget about menus.

Hope this helps.

[Drew Lahat]

Fascinating stuff – as a feature editor myself, I love articles that dig deeper than your typical press junket (especially those frame.io blog posts!).
I’d like to remind everyone that while old, FCP7 was a mature program capable of big-budget feature level work; Walter Murch made sure of that while working on Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, with FCP v3 (not Final Cut Studio 3 ????). The book Behind the Seen tells the tale, it was a great read during film school…

[Drew Lahat]

I’m sorry to hear that “early adopter” pains beleaguer this system. The whole point of putting up with the MP’s cost is so you can hit the ground running and not spend days dealing with wrangling software configurations. With that amount of hassle you could’ve migrated everything to Windows by now… (and I’m saying that as someone who’s been all-Mac for 10 years, and still is.)

For the rest of us, the natural conclusion is simply that it’s too early to update to Catalina – and since the MP only supports Catalina & up, it’s too early to buy the MP.

As for myself, I used to be the facility engineer of a post-house, ACMT, and maintained Macs all around Hollywood… and now, running my own little outfit, I’m very happy with my 2010 cMP workhorse. ☺ Kitted with plenty of RAM, USB3, and a modern AMD GPU, it happily runs Resolve, CC2020 and crunches 4K.
The pace of technology updates is so frantic these days, I think one of the worst things you can do is follow all of Apple’s updates. It’s about maintaining the system the works for your work, not the other way around.

[Drew Lahat]

If someone is still making DVD’s in 2019… (I do sometimes, because a few clients ask for it), indeed baking your subtitles into your video is one possible workflow. (And there are much more efficient methods to get it done than using Flash ???? and manually re-timing every single subtitles.) But of course that is a different animal, and misses the whole point of optional subtitles / closed captions.

So I’m writing to add that I experienced the same problem as the OP – Encore doesn’t complain about gaps with DVD’s, but it did fail to build the disc with the notorious PGC %0 error.
The solution that worked for me was to create gaps between the subtitles. Not with Encore (the gap fix option is grayed out anyway for DVD’s), but in my subtitling software (Subtitle Edit). It allowed me to go for a more subtle 2-frame gap, compared to Encore’s extreme and excessive 5-frame BD gap. (Which btw, is why I banned Encore for BD’s and use tsmuxerGUI whenever I don’t need menus.)

[Drew Lahat]

Thanks!

[Drew Lahat]

Thanks for the reply, Chris, but none of it answers my question. ☺

Indeed, in the scopes you don’t see sub-blacks. And with the hardware boxes & cards, I’m not talking about HDR or nits, but about Rec.709 sub-blacks bit values.
Anyone who uses Premiere with a hardware box and knows what a SMPTE PLUGE is should be immediately able to answer..