Larry Applegate
Forum Replies Created
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There are many posts on many forums about the quality of blank DVD’s. Some are crap. The old adage “you get what you pay for” doesn’t even apply. The cheap ones are often useless, so you get nothing. I use Verbatim, there are other good brands, do a search.
Given that, there is also a difference in burner quality. But a marginal burner will usually work better with a better quality blank. Also some burners work better with +R, and others -R. The only way to find out is to try your blanks on other burners, and your burner on other blanks.
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I bought 4 of these and made two 4 TB raid 0 sets on my Mac Pro.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0F10311/
Transcoded a 2.5 TB movie to one set, copied to the other, and sent the original pair to Germany. (I also have all of the captured footage on smaller drives, plus the original p2 cards on 500 GB drives).
Both raid 0 sets are working great. My colleague in Germany is backing up before starting his editing. This is a great price from a great company.
I like using only 2 drives since the odds are better, and I still have another slot to swap in different drives. I also bought 4 of these and sent 2 to Germany:
https://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2705
And I used these to transcode the footage from my seven 500 GB drives:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/FWU2ES2HDK/
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Hi Alan,
We offer BluStreak Premaster for replication from both Toast and Encore (or any BD authoring application). It was released last May.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Sorry, I missed the two additional posts when replying. By all means try a test with Toast 10, letting it do the encoding, to make a test project and burn it to BD-R.
Larry
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First, many things that work for DVD in Encore do not work in Blu-ray, including playlists.
Encore projects can be difficult to move to another machine unless you keep the same exact paths or relative paths. Yes, I have seen that message when I tried to run a project created by a colleague on his machine, even though both were Macs.
Once something goes wrong with a project, it is probably best to start over. Once you become familiar with the interface it doesn’t take that long, and you are much less likely to “stress” the program the 2nd time around. But I was able to run my colleague’s project by deleting some of the files in the encore project folder, particularly things that looked like caching going on. This was strictly by guesswork. If you want to try this keep a copy of the original folder, of course.
Keep at it, you will eventually succeed when you learn to avoid the pitfalls, and then it will run much better.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Can you give us more information? (I don’t want to study that very old article, some things have changed).
Are you on PC or Mac? Are you using CS3 or CS4? Did you make sure to select Blu-ray for both the project and for transcoding?
If you are on Mac you can build to a Blu-ray folder and use Toast or my free application “BluStreak Burner” to burn the disc. Or on PC there is also ImgBurn. You can also do very simple authoring with Toast 10.
Are you using a BD-RE, so you don’t waste a BD-R each time you try something? Most of us have found Verbatim to be the most reliable manufacturer.
You can find a link to download BluStreak Burner on our web site.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
You may not need to, most European players and TV’s will play NTSC, though most US Players and TV’s will not play PAL.
But if you want to proceed anyway, you will have to make a new project and start over, and encode for PAL. Even the menus will be somewhat different because the frame sizes aren’t the same, PAL has more pixels and a slower frame rate.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/ -
Tom,
AVCHD is essentially H264 minus some of the bells and whistles. So it seems counter-intuitive to switch it to MPEG-2, I think you may lose quality, but I’ve never tried it. I see no big advantage to using a higher bit rate than the original video. But this is just opinion on what seems logical to me.
I have a Canon HF10 AVCHD camera, and it produces outstanding results. (If the lighting is good and I use a tripod). I use Final Cut and Compressor mostly. But I also ran a local TV show’s Final Cut export through the Adobe H264 encoder using a higher bit rate, and also got outstanding results, the director couldn’t see any real difference from the original video, which was shot on higher-end AVCHD cameras. I didn’t try a lower bit rate, since it was only a 30-minute show.
Larry
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Tom,
Thanks for the name of XMB and the hint to turn off automatic play. I will bring home a Hollywood BD and one of ours replicated from Encore and see if I can figure out what it takes to display the name and the thumbnail. But I suspect it will only work for replicated discs, not burned. The dichotomy between replicated and burned is very strict in Blu-ray. I do have a replicated European disc from Encore and it showed “BD-ROM” instead of “BD-R” or “BD-RE”. But it is 1080i50 and won’t play on a US PS3.
For your timeline problem, I very much doubt it has to do with which encoder you used. H264 is just better than MPEG2. If you do a new Job in BluStreak Burner and open the build folder you can see all of the files and their sizes. Encore has a habit of creating very short dummy tracks for their navigation purposes, but they wouldn’t be 10 GB worth. Do you have a long motion menu with a loop point? We have unreleased tools that can figure out what is going on if you were to send me your build. (We are working on our own authoring application).
It would seem your simpler solution would be to concatenate your original assets in Premiere before encoding. That is the normal way to make long continuous tracks, rather than (again) trusting the DVD or BD authoring program to do it properly. It is also usually easier to designate the chapter points in the NLE, and make sure that the encoding honors them so that chapters always start with a full frame.
If you would like to discuss these things in more detail, you can drop me a personal email at larry at dvdafteredit dot com.
Regards,
Larry Applegate
https://blustreak.dvdafteredit.com/