Blu Ray PQ
 

Are BR discs recorded with Toast comparable in PQ to commercial ones, or does it depend on many variables?

My footage was shot at 1080i in HDV.

It depends on how you transcode the video and what encoder you use.

I'd be using MOV files in Toast 10.

Home Burned BluRay PQ is very similar to commercial quality, though not the same. So if you were processing video sourced by the $100k-$500k professional cameras with your Toast program, you could achieve similar results.

But HDV isn't magically going to look great just because it's on BluRay.

It looked pretty good when I was doing it because 1440x1080/60i is a natively supported format for Blu-ray. Perhaps some of the problems people had were in thinking they had to transcode it to 1920, which they don't.

Sure. But when compared to "commercial" BluRay when the Source is scanned film, 4k or even 2k, HDV isn't going to look the same. This is not to say it can't look "good" because it certainly can.

What I'm hoping for is PQ that's significantly better than the disappointing quality I'm getting with DVDs created with FCP-QT-Compressor-DVDSP.

I own some DVDs produced by small independents that look even fuzzier than mine (like some PBS music specials), and other DVDs that are near BR in quality. I want to burn a BR that looks at least like a high quality commercial DVD.