[Matt Townley]

Hi Pawel,

Those colored backgrounds you are seeing are not “actually” part of your layout. They are being displayed to indicate various composition errors or indicators.

The pink background means there is a problem with the font being used, typically a missing font. I believe the blue is a kerning highlight and and I’m not sure about the grey.

Go to INDESIGN > PREFERENCES > COMPOSITION and the first section is a list of items that you can have highlighted. My guess if you have all or several of these boxes checked.

If you change your screen mode from Normal to Preview (toggle the W key or go to VIEW > SCREEN MODE) all of these highlights should go away when you are in Preview mode.

[Matt Townley]

Hi Nick,

I have tried Line 1, Falcon, Verbatim and a few other “off brand” discs for BD-R. So far I have been happiest with Falcon and Verbatim. We use white thermal discs in the shop here, but I know they have inkjet, too. I get all our discs from The Tape Company, which bought Media Distributors and now all goes by Media Distributors.

Not sure about the issue of different grades for “mastering” vs. regular quality. I know there are various grades, just as there are for CD/DVD, but I’m not sure how the manufacturers actually describe those differences. We use “A” grade for everything except for our lowest value-line offering of silver CDs that we do black only printing on for local bands and musicians that just want the cheapest of cheap.

Hope that helps.

[Matt Townley]

Your video has to end up as MPEG2 files to go to DVD. If you use anything else, you can assume your authoring software is encoding it for you in the background, which you typically want to avoid.

[Matt Townley]

I would ask your sales rep about it. If you can narrow the problem down to being that specific, it sounds like you are right about it being a disc-specific issue. Even if they won’t admit to changing something on them, maybe you can at least get them exchanged for a different disc?

[Matt Townley]

Hi Heraldo,

Welcome to the COW. It sounds like you know what you are looking for, so I’m not sure what part you need help with.

Do you just need to know how to create the text boxes that are the size you want? Can you clarify a bit what you are asking?

Thanks!

[Matt Townley]

I’ll add another vote for LG. I have tried Pioneer, LG and Plextor and LG is by far my favorite so far.

[Matt Townley]

Hi John,

We have several Rimage Producer systems and run them pretty much all day, so we move a lot of discs. While I can’t speak to your specifics, I can tell you that there are several factors that impact the discs not being picked up correctly.

The disc itself is one of them, and it might be work asking your sales rep to check to see if anything has changed with the manufacturing lately that might impact it. This does occasionally happen. Another thing that we see a lot is discs sticking together, which causes problems because then they drop and get jammed places or you end up with two discs stacked on top of each other in the drive or on the printer. This can happen when humidity rises, which starts to happen around this time of year. We fan the discs with our hands really well and then use compressed air (from a compressor, not a can) to blast all of the discs before they are loaded to make sure they are nice and dry and separated.

One other thing you could check is the alignment of the picker/gripper of your Primera. Over time it can drift and if it is slightly out of alignment, it may not be making proper contact with the discs. This could be causing picker failure. Check with the manufacturer to see how you remedy this as it is different for every system.

[Matt Townley]

Never done it, but even just the thought of it scares me. I wouldn’t rely on it. If it’s THAT important, I would rather rely on a known-good method to record the file to hard drive or a faster form of SSD and then spend the time to copy it to the thumb drive. If you are really curious, I would try it a few times with the exact setup you would use and see how it goes. Maybe it will work ok, but I wouldn’t assume so without trying it first. Can you record to DVD or tape for them? That could be done in real time.

[Matt Townley]

In no particular order, here are some that I know of to convert AVCHD on the cheap:

https://www.ifunia.com/avchd-converter-mac.html
https://www.wondershare.com/pro/dvd-converter.html

I also believe some of the later versions of Toast will convert AVCHD, but I believe I heard there was some type of “gotcha” or quirk with sync or something with that. Double check me there.

I’m sure there are other options if you just want to preview them.

[Matt Townley]

Hi Geralyn,

HD-DVD is dead. There are almost no instances where it should ever be used. I say almost because I have one client that adopted it very early on and uses it for a specific purpose in-house, so I deliver on it for them. They are literally the only client I use it for and they are the only people I know that use it.

These is a thread below this that we just discussed delivering in HD. You should read it as it has some good comments. There are a lot of assumptions you have to make to deliver HD to someone. While you are typically safe delivering a BD-R, even this isn’t a given. Talk to the person you are giving it to and find out what methods they have to play it. Perhaps an HD Quicktime or WMV file on a flash drive or DVD-Rom is the best way for them. If it seems uncomfortable to ask up front, try to spin it into a chance to demonstrate that you understand the technology and the current limitations of it.

Specifically to your question about Compressor – I believe versions 3.5 and 4 can both burn simple Blu-ray Discs. Toast and Adobe Encore can also do this, both with a few more options than Compressor.