I've been reading and reading and reading, and watching dozens of video tutorials online, following lynda.com, etc. etc. etc. but I just have been finding so many conflicting workflows for those us us who use Final Cut to edit, Compressor to encode, Encore to burn Blurays.

Mpeg2 or H264? Program or Elementary Stream? Average vs. Maximum Bit Rates?

Just wondering if anyone can tell me from their experience what they have found to work best and why. I prefer not to make coasters, and all of this internet knowledge is getting overwhelming with so many different choices and no real reason to choose one thing over the other. My primary focus is wedding videos, so looking at about 1-1.5 hours for most projects.

Any insight at all is much appreciated!

I'll assume you're working on Encore 5.0 or newer.
Encore likes to work with Elementary streams..

Therefore video streams will be .m2v or .m4v (depending on Mpeg2 or .h264)
Audio streams should be left at uncompressed .wav.
Forget elementary streams.

For video encodes, I prefer Mpeg2 format (since it's only an hour and a half).
They will be much faster, and you will fit the BluRay fine.
You will have many people telling you to use .h264, but it's much more intensive computing, but it's your choice.
Let the bitrate calculator (http://dvd-hq.info/bitrate_calculator.php) to determine min./average/max bitrates.
The length of you final product will determine this.
Use VBR 1 pass. You should be fine.

On a final note, do a sample encode (5 min or so), and verify that Encore doesn't want to re-transcode all your hard work. It happens sometimes..

Good luck!!!

Thanks for the reply Peter. I am using encore 5.0...although I'm confused...on the opening statement you said Encore likes to use Elementary streams, then later you said "Forget elementary streams"--was that just pertaining to the audio part?

I did a test a while back using program stream settings and they seemed to work just fine, which is why I am so confused. Do both stream types work?

Also curious what burning technique you prefer...I have burned a few test projects straight from encore, but when I use DVD Studio pro I find that program once in a great while resulted in faulty discs...so my process with that had always been to create the video ts folders and burn with toast at a slow speed...perfect results. Do you find the same with encore? Do you burn from a video ts file, or a disk image, or straight from encore?

Ahhhhhhhh....

Good catch..My bad.

Authoring programs like elementary streams. Keep away from program streams.
A program stream has both audio and video in a single file..
Let the authoring software assemble and transcode the .wav file and .m2v (.m24) . It's designed to do so.

Create an .ISO, and use any burning program ( I use ImgBurn), and burn the .ISO to a good quality BluRay. Stick within the parameters of the encode, and you won't need to worry about faulty BluRays.

Rundown:

Burn the ISO, use a good burner, use better quality discs, burn at 70% max, stay within encoding parameters, and everything should be good to go..

Thanks Peter, this is all very helpful!

Ahhhhhhhh....

Good catch..My bad.

Authoring programs like elementary streams. Keep away from program streams.
A program stream has both audio and video in a single file..
Let the authoring software assemble and transcode the .wav file and .m2v (.m24) . It's designed to do so.

Create an .ISO, and use any burning program ( I use ImgBurn), and burn the .ISO to a good quality BluRay. Stick within the parameters of the encode, and you won't need to worry about faulty BluRays.

Rundown:

Burn the ISO, use a good burner, use better quality discs, burn at 70% max, stay within encoding parameters, and everything should be good to go..

Hi Peter,

Please pardon my elementary question, but I've been having some issues burning Blu-Rays in Encore vs right from FCPX.

When I burn a test Blu-Ray from FCPX from a project that has 60i footage from a Vixia M50, the Blu-Ray looks fantastic... smooth, no jitter (or jutter...whatever they call the jittery picture from interlaced files) When I export a Master File from FCPX, and throw that into Encore to burn, I get jitter.

What should I be doing? Actually, my goal was to avoid Blu-Rays all together and get it streaming right from the hard drive to my XBox or PS3, but I could never get a jitter-free Blu-Ray quality picture... so I decided Blu-Ray was my only choice.

What would you advice for burning Blu-Rays... and if possible, is there any way to match that picture quality with a digital file stored in my HD-based media library?