[Ken Hon]

We just sent a Blu-ray project out for replication and used Compressor to produce the avc stream. I thought it looked really good. I haven’t tried compressing/encoding in Toast, but I did burn one test disk and it looked fine (using the stream from Compressor). The one advantage of using compressor is that it produces a legal stream for replication. We did our authoring in Netblender and burned most of our test disks on the PC side and I thought the quality was very close to the original material shot on a Sony EX-1. If you do use the compressor stream, make sure you go into toast and set the encode setting to never (or something along that line).

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

I’ve actually figured out the problem, finally. I used Toast 10 on the Mac to take the raw 264 and ac3 files and burn a blu-ray from the Mac side (you have to set up toast so it doesn’t re encode the file, but that was simple). That played fine on our Sony player. So we figured that the error was induced during copying. When you run Windows 7 under Bootcamp you can see the Mac HFS formated drives and you can copy files from them (can’t copy to them, same thing looking at the NTFS drives from the Mac side). Evidently there is a super secret hidden 4GB copy limit under Win7 copying from HFS drives. It allows you to copy a file greater than 4 GB unlike FAT32 drives which just show a failure to copy. So it happily makes the 6 or 7 GB files we were transferring, but after it didn’t actually copy anything past the first 4 GB, it simply appended data from the first part of the file to the end of the file to make up the size difference! Nice little trick. So I installed MacDrive on the Win7 Bootcamp machine and it copies just fine now so our project is up and running. I guess most people don’t encounter this as they are working on SANs or they’re smart enough to install this software from the beginning.

[Ken Hon]

Thanks Rafael.

And just to add to this story, I set up a separate dedicated Windows machine and I’m seeing the same problem both in the raw 264 stream and in the muxed stream and compile BD file. So it must be happening on the Mac side, probably in compressor. Its almost like we have a setting wrong somewhere, but all we’ve specified is the codec, video size etc. We’re not transcoding or applying filters. Go figure.

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Thanks Rafael,

We’ve not only closed and opened Compressor and also cleared the History window and the Batch window, we’ve also used Compressor repair, and completly unistalled and reinstalled Compressor, Qmaster, and Motion, but with identical results.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Michael (nice avatar!)

The reason we’re muxing with Netblender is that we’re making a BDCMF master for replication. What I can see on the PC side is not just the muxed file, but I can also view the raw .264 avc transport stream and both have the identical problem. I think this brings it down to either a Win 7 (64 bit) problem under Bootcamp or the file was incorrectly encoded on the Mac. Your idea of muxing the 264 file and the ac3 file on the Mac would help isolate the issue, but I’m not sure how to go about this in Compressor. If you have a workflow I’d love to know it, but it has to allow me to make the 264 transport file first, then mux them together so I can analyze the workflow. Burning straight from our QT file to blu-ray won’t help that much, though I should probably check that as well.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha John and Rafael,

Thanks for the replies. If it were only so easy : ) Sorry I should have said that we were only writing to HFS MacOS extended drives, no FAT32 drives anywhere. The output file is 7GB in size, its just that compressor returns to the beginning everytime hits the 4 GB mark. That is our show begins to repeat internally.

We tried every combination writing between two different 5TB Sata arrays and the boot drive. All produced the same result. Near as I can figure this is going on in compressor or bootcamp, but I can’t figure out what’s causing it.

I also have already used Digital Rebellions compressor fixer with no change. And I followed Apple’s instructions and manually removed everything related to Compressor, Qmaster, and Motion and reinstalled them all, no change.

Something is limiting Compressor to only using the first 4GB of the QT movie and it’s like the sun rising everyday, totally repeatable, I just can’t figure out where the gremlin is hiding. I’ve trashed all my preferences, I guess the next thing is to uninstall FCS completely and reinstall it. The one thing I will say is that I’m a total amatuer in regards to Qmaster as we just moved up from an old G5 Quad (we’ve been using FCP and DVDSP for about 6 years and have replicated thousands of DVDs, so we’re not total newbies on that front at least)

Aloha,

Ken