Jonathan Bird
January 7th, 2009, 09:16 AM
Hi Everyone,
I do not yet own a blu-ray burner, however, I wanted to put some short-form HD content on disk for delivery to a film festival, as blu-ray is the easiest way to distribute HD. After some research, I decided that Toast 10 should do what I need (I'm on a Mac) until Steve Jobs can get over his "big bag of hurt" and get with the program for blu-ray support for DVDSP. My plan was to create "blu-ray spec" disks and burn them on standard DVD-R with the burner I already own.
So, I downloaded Toast 10 with the HD plugin, which cost me $99. Installed it, and it runs fine.
A word of note: it burns normal DVD/CD pig dog slow. My superdrive which goes 40x on CD and 4x on DVD only burns at 3-4x on CD and 1x on DVD with Toast 10. No explanation why. I used my newly down-loaded version of Toast 10 to write a back-up on CD-R and it took 14 minutes. When was the last time burning a HALF FULL CD took you 14 minutes? 1999? I have opened a tech support call to ask. For burning "regular" CDs and DVDs, use your old version of Toast.
OK, back to the blu-ray. My source material is all HDV 1080i/60 edited in HDV codec on FCP. I'm editing on an old G5 dual 2 Gig processor desktop machine. My first attempt was to output mpeg2 and AC3 files for my 10 minute test piece using slightly modified versions of the Compressor HDDVD preset, with the thing turned up to full quality (maximum bitrate). Toast 10 easily recognizes the two resulting files, and pairs them up as one stream. Even though you have the option to select "don't re-encode" on Toast, it re-encodes anyway. Takes a while. My 10 minute segment took over an hour to encode. When I put the resulting DVD in my brand new Sony S-350 blu-ray player, it would not play. It would not give me a menu. Nothing. So I scratched my head, and went back to my office.
I re-encoded the disk with the "auto-play" button checked, so it would bypass the menu and automatically play the first item on the disk.
The resulting disk played, but didn't look very good at all. Bad artifacting. Looking at the data stream, I noticed that the video was AVCHD (H.264) even though I had created mpeg2 in compressor and selected "don't re-encode" on Toast.
My next attempt was to output AVCHD from compressor and try that on the disk. Since the blu-ray spec calls for blu-ray players to be able to play a DVD at ~3x the maximum SD bitrate, we can expect to be able to use up to about 30 Mbps peak on the combined data stream. I used 15 Mpbs average/20 Mbps peak on my AVCHD file, figuring that it would definitely be playable on DVD at that rate (going too high will cause skipping). I used a Compressor preset for HD-DVD again (this time the H.264-based version), changing the bitrates to match my needs. I output a separate AC3 file for audio at 320 kbps.
At 12 hours into the render with my old G5, and it telling me that that the render was going to take another 20 hours (!!!), I cancelled it. (Keep in mind this is only a 10 minute segment!) I do have a fast laptop, so I decided to move the rendering over there. I output a straight HDV file of my edit (took 15 minutes) from FCP to a hard drive, took it over to my relatively new macbook pro, fired up Compressor and did the AVCHD render there. It took 4 hours.
When I imported it into Toast, it was happy to import both the AC3 and the AVCHD file, but would not pair them up. It would only accept them as two different items. So I burned the disk without the audio as a test. (When you create your AVCHD file from Compressor, check the box to include PCM audio, and Toast will then get the audio. You can then later tell toast to make it AC3 and pick a data rate when it re-encodes. I was trying to avoid the re-encoding so this is why I created separate tracks to begin with.)
It still re-encoded the video stream, even though I selected "don't re-encode." I have decided that no matter what you provide Toast, it re-encodes. So I went into the custom settings and set Toast to re-encode at the same bit rate (15/20) that I used when exporting from compressor. In my blu-ray player, the resulting disk looked better than the first, but still not as good as it could look. Shadows were still noisy and significant artifacting around fine details.
Next, I decided that if Toast is going to re-encode no matter what, I need to give Toast the best quality file I can. Would it be willing to take the HDV stream I had exported from Final Cut? This is about as clean as I can give it. Guess what? It is perfectly happy to digest HDV! So I dragged the HDV file in, put the AVCHD settings in Toast at 15 Mbps average, 20 peak, and hit the go button. (At this point, I was doing all the work on the laptop....it's much faster). About an hour later, I had a disk. (Toast encodes AVCHD much much faster than compressor). I put the disk in the player, and it looks quite good...the best so far!! Now we're getting somewhere!
Now to address the menus. Toast has a tool for creating a very basic menu so you can select different streams to play. I created a second HDV file from another edit. I put both of these HDV streams into Toast, selected one of the menu templates, gave everything names, picked keyframes to represent the buttons and, just to be safe, selected "auto-play" for the first item. (That means that when you put the disk in the blu-ray player, it will play the first item without going to a menu.)
I rendered/compiled this disk and put it in the Sony S-350. The first item played fine, but once it ended...no menu. I was unable to make the Sony give me a menu no matter what I did, and believe me I spent a while scratching my head and pushing buttons on the remote. I was unable to play the second track because of this.
After several more experiments, I have to conclude that Toast 10 makes menus that either don't work at all, or don't work with the Sony S-350, which is my only test bed for the disks. I have a neighbor with a PSP so I'll take one over there to test as well.
My advice if you create disks with multiple tracks is to click the button in Toast that puts them in sequential automatic playing order. Then I think you could move through them with the chapter buttons. (Not sure....I'm rendering that test right now!) Will update soon.
So my experiments so far conclude the following:
1. Toast 10 sucks for burning normal DVD or CD. It is slow as molasses.
2. Toast 10 always re-encodes HD video no matter what you tell it or what kind of HD source you give it.
3. The best video I got out of it was by giving it an HDV stream to render (containing both audio and video) and then setting it to AVCHD output (AVCHD has better performance at the lower bitrates required for playback from DVD-R rather than BD-R.) Settings that played fine on my blu-ray player were 15 Mbps average/20 Mbps peak for video and 320 kbps for audio. (Experimenting with higher bitrates now).
4. The menus don't work at all so far as I can tell.
I will report more later, as I am continuing my tests. By the way, the documentation for Toast is very very basic, and there is virtually nothing in there to help with any of this.
Jonathan
I do not yet own a blu-ray burner, however, I wanted to put some short-form HD content on disk for delivery to a film festival, as blu-ray is the easiest way to distribute HD. After some research, I decided that Toast 10 should do what I need (I'm on a Mac) until Steve Jobs can get over his "big bag of hurt" and get with the program for blu-ray support for DVDSP. My plan was to create "blu-ray spec" disks and burn them on standard DVD-R with the burner I already own.
So, I downloaded Toast 10 with the HD plugin, which cost me $99. Installed it, and it runs fine.
A word of note: it burns normal DVD/CD pig dog slow. My superdrive which goes 40x on CD and 4x on DVD only burns at 3-4x on CD and 1x on DVD with Toast 10. No explanation why. I used my newly down-loaded version of Toast 10 to write a back-up on CD-R and it took 14 minutes. When was the last time burning a HALF FULL CD took you 14 minutes? 1999? I have opened a tech support call to ask. For burning "regular" CDs and DVDs, use your old version of Toast.
OK, back to the blu-ray. My source material is all HDV 1080i/60 edited in HDV codec on FCP. I'm editing on an old G5 dual 2 Gig processor desktop machine. My first attempt was to output mpeg2 and AC3 files for my 10 minute test piece using slightly modified versions of the Compressor HDDVD preset, with the thing turned up to full quality (maximum bitrate). Toast 10 easily recognizes the two resulting files, and pairs them up as one stream. Even though you have the option to select "don't re-encode" on Toast, it re-encodes anyway. Takes a while. My 10 minute segment took over an hour to encode. When I put the resulting DVD in my brand new Sony S-350 blu-ray player, it would not play. It would not give me a menu. Nothing. So I scratched my head, and went back to my office.
I re-encoded the disk with the "auto-play" button checked, so it would bypass the menu and automatically play the first item on the disk.
The resulting disk played, but didn't look very good at all. Bad artifacting. Looking at the data stream, I noticed that the video was AVCHD (H.264) even though I had created mpeg2 in compressor and selected "don't re-encode" on Toast.
My next attempt was to output AVCHD from compressor and try that on the disk. Since the blu-ray spec calls for blu-ray players to be able to play a DVD at ~3x the maximum SD bitrate, we can expect to be able to use up to about 30 Mbps peak on the combined data stream. I used 15 Mpbs average/20 Mbps peak on my AVCHD file, figuring that it would definitely be playable on DVD at that rate (going too high will cause skipping). I used a Compressor preset for HD-DVD again (this time the H.264-based version), changing the bitrates to match my needs. I output a separate AC3 file for audio at 320 kbps.
At 12 hours into the render with my old G5, and it telling me that that the render was going to take another 20 hours (!!!), I cancelled it. (Keep in mind this is only a 10 minute segment!) I do have a fast laptop, so I decided to move the rendering over there. I output a straight HDV file of my edit (took 15 minutes) from FCP to a hard drive, took it over to my relatively new macbook pro, fired up Compressor and did the AVCHD render there. It took 4 hours.
When I imported it into Toast, it was happy to import both the AC3 and the AVCHD file, but would not pair them up. It would only accept them as two different items. So I burned the disk without the audio as a test. (When you create your AVCHD file from Compressor, check the box to include PCM audio, and Toast will then get the audio. You can then later tell toast to make it AC3 and pick a data rate when it re-encodes. I was trying to avoid the re-encoding so this is why I created separate tracks to begin with.)
It still re-encoded the video stream, even though I selected "don't re-encode." I have decided that no matter what you provide Toast, it re-encodes. So I went into the custom settings and set Toast to re-encode at the same bit rate (15/20) that I used when exporting from compressor. In my blu-ray player, the resulting disk looked better than the first, but still not as good as it could look. Shadows were still noisy and significant artifacting around fine details.
Next, I decided that if Toast is going to re-encode no matter what, I need to give Toast the best quality file I can. Would it be willing to take the HDV stream I had exported from Final Cut? This is about as clean as I can give it. Guess what? It is perfectly happy to digest HDV! So I dragged the HDV file in, put the AVCHD settings in Toast at 15 Mbps average, 20 peak, and hit the go button. (At this point, I was doing all the work on the laptop....it's much faster). About an hour later, I had a disk. (Toast encodes AVCHD much much faster than compressor). I put the disk in the player, and it looks quite good...the best so far!! Now we're getting somewhere!
Now to address the menus. Toast has a tool for creating a very basic menu so you can select different streams to play. I created a second HDV file from another edit. I put both of these HDV streams into Toast, selected one of the menu templates, gave everything names, picked keyframes to represent the buttons and, just to be safe, selected "auto-play" for the first item. (That means that when you put the disk in the blu-ray player, it will play the first item without going to a menu.)
I rendered/compiled this disk and put it in the Sony S-350. The first item played fine, but once it ended...no menu. I was unable to make the Sony give me a menu no matter what I did, and believe me I spent a while scratching my head and pushing buttons on the remote. I was unable to play the second track because of this.
After several more experiments, I have to conclude that Toast 10 makes menus that either don't work at all, or don't work with the Sony S-350, which is my only test bed for the disks. I have a neighbor with a PSP so I'll take one over there to test as well.
My advice if you create disks with multiple tracks is to click the button in Toast that puts them in sequential automatic playing order. Then I think you could move through them with the chapter buttons. (Not sure....I'm rendering that test right now!) Will update soon.
So my experiments so far conclude the following:
1. Toast 10 sucks for burning normal DVD or CD. It is slow as molasses.
2. Toast 10 always re-encodes HD video no matter what you tell it or what kind of HD source you give it.
3. The best video I got out of it was by giving it an HDV stream to render (containing both audio and video) and then setting it to AVCHD output (AVCHD has better performance at the lower bitrates required for playback from DVD-R rather than BD-R.) Settings that played fine on my blu-ray player were 15 Mbps average/20 Mbps peak for video and 320 kbps for audio. (Experimenting with higher bitrates now).
4. The menus don't work at all so far as I can tell.
I will report more later, as I am continuing my tests. By the way, the documentation for Toast is very very basic, and there is virtually nothing in there to help with any of this.
Jonathan