I have a Lacie Blu-ray burner coming tomorrow and I'm trying to find the best workflow for output to Blu-ray of 5D footage.

I use Mac, Premiere Pro to edit and also have AfterEffects which usually is where my final grading and rendering takes place. I do not have FCP nor can I really get access to a PC to use any special PC rendering programs (although I do have bootcamp and XP on my Mac, but don't want to really go there in my workflow).

I haven't really seen a definitive work-flow out there on the boards to have the best possible Blu-ray created from edited footage. I keep my footage original at 30fps (waiting for firmware 24fps) and so I'm worried about sync issues with audio.

I hope to not have to do too many tests since disks are still pushing $5 a pop and I figure I'm going through a stack in this first series to get this right, but would like to avoid this.

First off, I have both Mac and PC's. I also have a Lacie external Blu-ray burner (no doubt the same one you are getting tomorrow). How do I say this? The current Blu-ray burning options on Mac platforms are ... shall we say ... less than satisfying. I don't use Adobe products, so I can't comment on how effective Adobe Encore is or isn't.

I have tried using Roxio Titanium with the Blu-ray plugin on the Mac, and to be honest with you, I have never been successful in getting a disc burned, (I am on a quad G-5 with 8 gigs of ram and a 1TB G Raid.) I haven't upgraded FCP, because I don't have an Intel Mac, so it is Roxio or nothing for me on the Mac.

However, what I do have is a lowly, humble, home-made PC (about 4 years old) with a gig of ram running XP with $79.00 Simple Tech external 1TB drive. I have Sony DVD Architect Pro 5 on the box. That set-up works great. I have posted my work-flow in the Blu-ray subforum. Here is a link to it:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/blu-ray-authoring/466129-why-does-dvd-architect-want-recompress-everything-2.html

My only other advice would be to start out using a BD/RE disc. I can't tell you how many BD/R coasters that I made. The BD/RE discs are expensive, but you really only need 1, and it is going to be cheaper in the long-run than having 5 or 8 coasters.

Good luck!

I have posted my work-flow in the Blu-ray subforum. Here is a link to it:
I agree with Bill to check the Blu-ray sub-forum, and probably post your question there. Lots of good help is available. This is about the only topic where I'm glad I'm stuck with PC instead of MAC; and I use Encore (PC version) for Blu-ray and it works very well.

Thanks Bill I'll take a look. I should have checked for this blu-ray forum before posting. So what's going on with your burns? You say Roxio won't burn with your setup? Why is that?

Wish I knew. It would just crash. Sometimes I would also get a weird quicktime error message as well. I you take a look at the Roxio forum, people were reporting all sorts of issues. It seemed to work flawlessly for some, and for others it didn't. (Also, it just seemed that Roxio was not the most professional tool out there. I could be wrong ... who knows?) I just didn't have the time or inclination to continue to putz around with it.

When you need to get the job done, you go for the tool the seems to work the best. From everything that I read, it seemed that there were a lot of (working) alternatives on windows machines. Just that simple.

For me, Toast Titanium 9 with the High-Def/Blu-ray Plug-in works just fine with an Imac 2,4 and a MacbookPro 2,8.
Drag and drop the master ProresLT exported from FCP, and burn it.
Encode fast and burn super fast.
Never had a single problem.
Give it a try.

Pedro

Pedro, would the same workflow work with an HDV master? It's 1080p24. Or would you recommend going to prores first? Can't wait to try it.

Can´t really say, Erik.
I always did the job with ProresLt files.
Sorry :-)

So I made my first bluray today via toast 10 and footage edited in Premiere pro and rendered out to prores. I let toast encode it and set the max bit rate to its max and the average to 15.

It came out great when played back on my LG player. However it was a long encode on my intel MacBook pro. It was 20mins of footage, 2 10 min clip that were graded differently. The encode for 20mins was roughly 2 hours and the burn about 10mins. I had no menus.

I decided to purchase the upgrade to toast 10 since I had to buy the bluray add on. Encore will not let you create a bluray at 1080 with progressive scan which I don't understand but toast 10 will.

So now I just have to figure out my authoring workflow so that I can make menus and then use toast to encode and burn.

Just a side note here....

For those of you who don't have a blu-ray recorder yet, you can use Toast 10 (or 9 I think) to burn a blu-ray using a standard DVD-R disc and it will still play in most blu-ray players.

Toast records the standard blu-ray data to disc, but in this case it's a DVD-R disc so it can only hold about 20 minutes of footage.

I've tried it many times and it works great. The only problem I've found is that it doesn't play on every blu-ray player. It works on our cheap Sony player we bought 2 years ago. But it wouldn't play on the high end Pioneer player at a friends audio/video shop.

But it's pretty cool that you can create blu-ray discs without a blu-ray recorder and without using blu-ray media. :)

Yep...I am also using Toast 10 after many unsuccessful attempts with Encore. I have been using HDV, 5d and 7d footage all converted to ProRes. The final product looked awesome to us and all I did was drop the Quicktime self-contained movies into Toast. As far as menus, we were able to alter one of the Toast template .psd's and create an acceptable custom menu for our clients. There are a couple of tutorials if you google it.

So I made my first bluray today via toast 10 and footage edited in Premiere pro and rendered out to prores.

** How did you render out to ProRes from Premiere? I thought ProRes was only for FCP.

...Encore will not let you create a bluray at 1080 with progressive scan which I don't understand but toast 10 will.

** That's interesting; thanks for giving us the heads up on this.

Just a side note here....

For those of you who don't have a blu-ray recorder yet, you can use Toast 10 (or 9 I think) to burn a blu-ray using a standard DVD-R disc and it will still play in most blu-ray players.

Toast records the standard blu-ray data to disc, but in this case it's a DVD-R disc so it can only hold about 20 minutes of footage.

I've tried it many times and it works great. The only problem I've found is that it doesn't play on every blu-ray player. It works on our cheap Sony player we bought 2 years ago. But it wouldn't play on the high end Pioneer player at a friends audio/video shop.

But it's pretty cool that you can create blu-ray discs without a blu-ray recorder and without using blu-ray media. :)

I succeeded in burning bluray data to a DVD-R disk, as you did, but it doesn't play on my Panasonic DMP-BD30 player. Too bad... It does play on a Sony Playstation though. Which 'cheap' 2-year old Sony Bluray player are you referring to? I can try and find one somewhere, if I know the type.

Just tried burning a 10min blu-ray video to a DVD and it didn't play back on my LG Blu-ray player. I tried a few burns to see if I was doing something wrong. I would love this option because I'm most likely not making anything over 20min anytime soon. At the same time, I wouldn't want to send something off and not have it play. Guess I'll stick with blu-ray disks, I bet they will be coming down in price after the holidays. I remember when CD's were $5 a pop as well. I'll guess BD-R's will be $3 or under by the summer.

Great! I'm glad it worked for you! (I was amazed the first time I did it)

I think our blu-ray player is the Sony BDP-S300. I see that you can buy them on Amazon for $85 bucks.

If I were you, I would take your DVD-R disc to the local electronics store and try playing it in all their different players. See which one's work. :)

I wish I could do that! But that's one of the main differences between shops in the US and shops over here: here they don't have stuff on display and they certainly don't want you to try out anything anymore. Hell, in a shop belonging to one of the big chains, they even refused to let me read the manual in order to get some more detailed technical information (which the salesman couldn't give me either).

So I guess I'll search for the Sony. Thanks for the info.