What Apple won't do, Adobe has - Get BR Done on a Mac

[Paul Cronin]

How hard was the internal MCE to install not external MCE? Sorry

I have found answers to the other questions.

Edit:
Well I will find out how hard the Blu-Ray drive is to install in a Mac Pro since I have one arriving mid next week. I will also post my findings using Encore and if that is easy great. If not I will go to Toast 9. Made the move to keep three clients happy who want Blu-Ray in Jan so time to get it dialed in.

[Chuck Spaulding]

Is there a good "external" Blu Ray burner available?

[Paul Cronin]

Chuck the same company MCE has a external USB 2.0 option. I went internal since 25-50GB on USB 2.0 could tie up the computer for a day. The internal is 6x and hard wired to the board so I am hoping it is a lot faster.

[Jason Bodnar]

Paul, please let me know how the install goes and how well it works, As I am interested in picking one of these up for my Mac Pro as well.

[Paul Cronin]

Jason I will be glad to post about the install and how well the burner works. Felt it was time and this seems to be the best option for the Mac Pro so far. Paid for two day shipping only $4 more then ground. It will be Wed or Thursday when I pull the cover off my Mac and install. Good timing since the next edit job is the following week.

Doing google searches a few people have said the manual that comes with the drive is well done. I have built a few PC's in the past so not to worried but was trying to see if Jared had found any tricks unless he had MCE install for him.

More next week.

[Paul Cronin]

Jason still no burner. Yesterday I called MCE and asked if they could check on my order since it had not arrived and I paid two day. After 10 minutes of waiting the person came back on the phone and said the burners are on back order. Hum they said in stock when I ordered and they also credited my card right when I ordered. So I mentioned this and he said they are in today WED and it will go out today.

Just a heads up on this company since they also have not responded to two emails in the past week. I will give them till Friday and then call back and if it has not shipped I will cancel and go to MacMall which is a retailer.

[Paul Cronin]

Jason I have not forgotten to let you know about the burner. I talked with MCE just now and they are telling me it will ship from their warehouse overnight at their charge on Monday so I will have it Tuesday.

[Jared Teter]

Sorry for the late reply. The installation of the MCE went smooth for me. As I recall I had to remove the currently installed DVD drive on my Mac Pro in order to have the room to connect everything up. Once both of the drives were connected (DVD and Blu-ray) I reinstalled everything back in the case and I was up and running with no issues. I had it installed and running in about 45 minutes. Of course, it could probably be done faster but I was taking my time to make sure that I didn't mess something up. I would create my .mov file and simply import it into Encore with no problems. It handles 29.97fps fine. I haven't used Toast simply because Encore was working fine for me.

[Paul Cronin]

Thank for the reply Jarad sounds like a easy install. I held off on Toast taking your advice already owning Encore CS3.

Look forward to delivering Blu-Ray in a couple of weeks.

[Paul Cronin]

Jason still no burner. MCE told me today that they are having a hard time getting enough of the burners from the manufacture. He felt bad and told me I am 25 on a list of 200 waiting and they get between 10-30 a week. They have asked for 100 a week.

So it seems like I will be Blu-Ray in 2009.

[Paul Cronin]

The MCE burner arrived today with no warning but that is OK with me. I will install tomorrow and try to burn my first short Blu-Ray to see how it plays.

Funny thing in the installation instructions there is a note saying

"Note: This drive is intended to be used as a data archival solution and is not intended for Blu-ray HD Video recording or playback."

I wonder if this is for liability since Jared has not had any problems burning HD Video on Blu-Ray disk with the same drive.

[Paul Cronin]

Easy install took about 30 min and everything fits fine. Drive powered up with out any problem.

MCE did say they send you a BR-RE with the drive I also purchased a second BR-RE. Glad I did since the disk they sent free is a DVD no BR-RE.

I went into Encore to try and build a simple disk. No luck and when I try and erase what is on the disk it says I can not since it was built on a PC. I am on a Mac Pro.

I have never used Encore before today but do have Lynda.com running in the other window helping step by step. Will keep trying today and if no luck I will buy Toast 9 and move forward.

[Paul Cronin]

Figured out Encore and have the short title ready to burn. But the quality is very poor when preview at full size. Any help would be great.

import in Encore is 1080p 30p (29.97) full size quicktime

I have tried setting in Mpeg 2 and H264 both at 24o progressive and 29.97 interlaced with all quality options.

[Devon Lyon]

We have had the 6x MCE BD burner for about a month. Worked fine with Toast Ti 9, but our Encore Cs3 wouldn't recognize the drive, even after re-install. We have a newer 8 core Mac with only 8GB rAM.

However, we upgraded to CS4 and the drive was recognized just fine. We are still experiencing some problems using Encore to both create the encode to the Blu-Ray H.264 standard and burn. We have experienced a number of crashes during the transcode.

We have found everything works like a dream if we export using Adobe's new stand alone encoder (an updated version of the media encoder) and then just import the Blu-Ray H.264 into Encore CS4 as an asset and then proceed as normal. The stock template HD menus look very nice as well.

[Paul Cronin]

Thanks for the response Devon.

I am trying not to upgrade to CS4 since I do not use my Adobe software often.

So from what you are saying Toast Ti 9 worked fine burning H.264 onto BD disk?