I have a job (wedding) coming up and the client wants a Blu-ray disc. The wedding will be shot with XH-A1 1080i24p and edited in FCP. I can give the client an SD DVD for approval. Once approved, I want to be able to take the HD edit and put in on Blu-ray.

Can someone recommend a service that can make me a blu-ray disc from some type of output from FCP?

Thanks.

Hi Josh,


Can someone recommend a service that can make me a blu-ray disc from some type of output from FCP?

The least expensive way I know of is by putting up to 30 minutes of content on a standard DVD with Toast and the blu-ray plug-in. I've just been creating auto-play blu-ray compatible DVD's - I've never tried Toast's menus. Toast and the plug-in coverts your movie (exported from FCP) and creates the BMDV file structure that makes it compatible with PS3 players and standalone blu-ray sets.

http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/plugin/overview.html

Thanks Joel, great suggestion.

That blows my mind. I can't even grasp that. I've heard of chinese blu-ray disk piracy where they burn 720p movies to DVD and pass them of as blu-ray... I guess this is how they do it.
I have one big stupid question:
DO YOU NEED A BLU-RAY BURNER, OR CAN MY POWERPC MAC DO THIS?

You can burn just over 25 min of BD content on a redlight (standard DVD burner).
Hope this helps.
-C

My powerpc PowerBook was never capable of burning those HD-DVDs through DVD Studio Pro. Are you sure it can do this? I don't see the difference.

Hi Aric,

That blows my mind. I can't even grasp that. I've heard of chinese blu-ray disk piracy where they burn 720p movies to DVD and pass them of as blu-ray... I guess this is how they do it.

Not necessarily. There are a lot of derivatives of MP4 that if encoded well can give you a decent looking HD file, but unless your player is able to play that format its useless on standalone set-top players. The way things are going with wireless media centers in the home and online content its starting to look like blu-ray won't develop anywhere near the following DVD's have.


I have one big stupid question:
DO YOU NEED A BLU-RAY BURNER, OR CAN MY POWERPC MAC DO THIS?

Any DVD-R or +R burner works fine. Gotta have Toast 9 and the blu-ray plug-in though. The file structure has to be right for a blu-ray player to recognize and read the disc.

My powerpc PowerBook was never capable of burning those HD-DVDs through DVD Studio Pro. Are you sure it can do this? I don't see the difference.

The easiest way to think about it is that its a blu-ray formated DVD-R. Because its only 4.37gb though, the amount it can hold is limited compared to a 25gb blu-ray disc.

Could a Double Layer Disk be used?

Other World Computing sells a true Blu-ray burner for Mac for $530 including Toast 9. I think you still need the plug-in for $20. So for $550 you're all set.

Personally, I'm thinking that I'm going to go this route and charge a premium (between 100 and 250, haven't decide yet) for Bl-ray and should pay off the burner quickly. I normally include 4 copies of the final DVD in my packages so I don't think a little extra for the Blu-ray would be a problem. Plus, IMO the people with Blu-ray are still "early adopters" and understand/accept the costs that come with early adoption. When Wal-mart has a $5 Blu-ray bin I'll start including it as standard in my package.

Hi Tom

Could a Double Layer Disk be used?

Absolutely, but in the few instances I've tried them for video content they've had very unreliable compatibility.

Josh - Let us know how it goes. I'm waiting for blu-ray burners to hit $100 before I bite. Internals are just breaking the $200 mark consistently now.



Other World Computing sells a true Blu-ray burner for Mac for $530 including Toast 9. I think you still need the plug-in for $20. So for $550 you're all set.

Personally, I'm thinking that I'm going to go this route and charge a premium (between 100 and 250, haven't decide yet) for Bl-ray and should pay off the burner quickly. I normally include 4 copies of the final DVD in my packages so I don't think a little extra for the Blu-ray would be a problem. Plus, IMO the people with Blu-ray are still "early adopters" and understand/accept the costs that come with early adoption. When Wal-mart has a $5 Blu-ray bin I'll start including it as standard in my package.

Josh also very interested since a few clients are talking about Blu-Ray in the spring.

The project I need it for is coming up in January so I will definitely report my experience back.

I just tried this out on my MBP and was amazed how well and easy it works.
I had a Quicktime movie that was exported from a XDCAM EX 1080 timeline.
(It was a combination of 1080 25P, 1080i and 720 25P slo-mo shots)
Dragged the file into toast 9, pressed burn and 5 min. later I had a a Blu-Ray ready to go.
Popped it into my PS3 and played it back on my Panasonic 42" and it looked great.

The best thing was that this was the first try!!!

So I guess you wedding shooters just have to make sure the final edit is no longer than 25 min and you´re ready yo go

PS The menu options are limited in Toast unfortunatly, not very "pro" looking templates I´m afraid

Joachim that is great. It would be nice to know how many Blu-Ray players normal DVD's and Toast 9 burn will work on from a Quicktime file.

I would like to know that too.
Unfortunatly not many people have them yet so it´s difficult to try them out on different players.
The PS3 seems to play any disk thrown at it, so it´s not the best machine to judge from.

Again, I was amazed at how well the image looked. It was skiing in powder snow and the detail in the spraying snow was just incredible

I guess the best way is to burn a short clip and take the disk to a place like Best Buy and go through all the Blu-Ray players. Not sure if they will allow this?

That´s a thought

Only problem I do not own Toast 9.

It was on sale this Black friday, but it´s not too bad though around $80-100

The original question was that the client wants a blu-ray disc, why do some of you telling him to burn blu-ray files on a standard DVD, that is not right, if you tell a client something then deliver the real deal, go out and buy a blu-ray burner, authoring program and encoder and deliver the blu-ray disc, if you don't want to invest in it right now then find somebody to do it for you, if you can't find somebody to do it for you, contact me privately and we can work something out.

Khoi we are just discussing the options. True if he wants Blu-Ray disk then he has to get a Blu-Ray burner but this is a forum to learn and we are just discussing the options which might help him.

Could burning onto a normal DVD for a test be cheaper then doing a test on a Blu-Ray disk I think so. So then once you go to Blu-Ray you could reduce your bad disk which would be a good thing.

You can buy a BD-RE and use it over and over, burn to DVD only gives you 20 minutes or so, and at low bitrate, if you really want to test, you must use BD-RE and test with the exact disc image you are going to burn for real and that include menus, chapters and everything.

Thanks Khoi that is good to know.
What burner do you use?
And what software?

I use the Sony bwu-200s burner, ProCoder to encoded and Encore to author, and have no problem with compatibilty with players so far.

Nice burner too bad it will not work with Mac OS.

Khoi - Are you saying that supplying a DVD with a blu-ray compatible file is somehow unethical? Just curious.

The original question was that the client wants a blu-ray disc, why do some of you telling him to burn blu-ray files on a standard DVD, that is not right, if you tell a client something then deliver the real deal, go out and buy a blu-ray burner, authoring program and encoder and deliver the blu-ray disc, if you don't want to invest in it right now then find somebody to do it for you, if you can't find somebody to do it for you, contact me privately and we can work something out.

I tried the FCP to Toast method a few weeks back and had no luck. I exported the video from FCS as a Quicktime reference file. I then opened it in Compressor and converted it to an H.264 file. I dropped that file into Toast and it recognized it, but when I tried to build the BD, it errored out. I'm not in front of my Mac Pro right now, but I'll update this post later with the error code. I did Google it and found other people were having the same problem. Roxio didn't seem to offer any ideas. Was this the correct way to get the video to Toast?

Khoi - Are you saying that supplying a DVD with a blu-ray compatible file is somehow unethical? Just curious.

Well heck yes, if you tell them that you are going to give them a blu-ray disc, then give them a blu-ray disc, not a dvd disc with half quality HD material on it, DVD media can't sustain 40mb/sec video data rate, all of my BD are VBR with up to 40mb/sec max bitrate for complex high details scenes.

Hi Khoi,

Well heck yes, if you tell them that you are going to give them a blu-ray disc, then give them a blu-ray disc, not a dvd disc with half quality HD material on it, DVD media can't sustain 40mb/sec video data rate, all of my BD are VBR with up to 40mb/sec max bitrate for complex high details scenes.

I can understand where your confusion comes from, but in every respect except capacity they are exactly the same. From my perspective, the client's and the organization that set up the blu-ray specification (see the blu-ray faq entry below) its a blu-ray disc. The bit rates I've used are in the 15-20 Mbps range (thats Mbps, not mb/sec.*) and are fully compatible blu-ray files with certificate included. This is the bit rate of many Hollywood movies on blu-ray. Saying the media is different may be a selling point for you, so good luck with that. Considering your investment (for me, on a Mac, it would be $1800 to do customized authoring and burn BR plus nearly 20x's the media cost per disc) you have every right to say there is an advantage to your product.

*Upper Case "B" for Bytes-MB/sec, MBytes/sec, MB/s and MBps means megabytes per second and is used for disk and tape transfer ratings.
Lower Case "b" for Bits-Mb/sec, Mbits/sec, Mb/s or Mbps means megabits per second and is used for transmission speeds in a network or in internal circuits.

"BD9 and BD5 are lower capacity variants of the Blu-ray Disc that contain Blu-ray compatible video and audio streams contained on a conventional DVD (650 nm wavelength / red laser) optical disc. Such discs offer the use of the same advanced compression technologies available to Blu-ray discs (including H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2) while using lower cost legacy media. BD9 uses a standard 8152MB DVD9 dual-layer disc while BD5 uses a standard 4482MB DVD5 single-layer disc. BD9/BD5 discs can be authored using home computers for private showing using standard DVD±R recorders. AACS digital rights management is optional. The BD9/BD5 format was originally proposed by Warner Home Video, as a cost-effective alternative to regular Blu-ray Discs. It was adopted as part of the BD-ROM basic format, file system, and AV specifications."

Actually most BD movies average at 29 Mbps with the max around 40Mbps and this is with AVC codec, I have lots of them and that is what it display on my PS3, AVC codec is twice as efficient as MPEG2 HD, now if you are using MPEG2 HD and you max out at 20Mbps then that is where you short change your customer, HD has 5 times the data of SD, if a good standard DVD encoded at 8Mbps, you would need 40Mbps in MPEG2 HD just to not compromise any quality when going to HD.
I don't know why it cost $1800.00 for a BD set up with Mac, but you can get a BD burner for around $300.00, DVDit HD for $300 and a computer and you are set.

Actually most BD movies average at 29 Mbps with the max around 40Mbps and this is with AVC codec, I have lots of them and that is what it display on my PS3, AVC codec is twice as efficient as MPEG2 HD, now if you are using MPEG2 HD and you max out at 20Mbps then that is where you short change your customer, HD has 5 times the data of SD, if a good standard DVD encoded at 8Mbps, you would need 40Mbps in MPEG2 HD just to not compromise any quality when going to HD..

I am using MPEG4-AVC. You can go up to 25Mbps but I've kept it at a max of 20. The results are stunning.

I don't know why it cost $1800.00 for a BD set up with Mac, but you can get a BD burner for around $300.00, DVDit HD for $300 and a computer and you are set.

Because the only DVD authoring solution on the Mac right now is to use Encore, which is bundled within CS4 at $1600. I assume you're not on a Mac? This is the Mac board, so its members are very well aware of the lack of options we have right now. Considering the amount of time it would take to payoff that investment blu-ray on DVD-R is the best solution, especially considering the weak demand.

I have Panasonic BD30 set-top blu-ray player with the latest firmware.

It plays BD-REs I have authored with TMPENc Authoring Works 4 just fine.

However, it errors out and does not play red-laser DVD media burned with the same exact ISO as was burned onto BD-RE.

I agree that at this stage, the more compatibility the better, and it'd appear that this can only be achieved by using normal BD-R media in the first place.

My burner is LG GGW-H20L, and I used Verbatim BD-RE media for my tests.