Blu Ray disc authoring
 

I was just trying to burn my latest production, shot on a new HMC150 to MPEG2 blu ray.

The problem is that when I select "PCM" for the audio codec, it comes back and says " cannot use, incompatible".

When I switch to "Dolby Digital", In have to activate this feature at a cost of $295!!!

Is there any way around this having to pay $300 just to burn a blu ray test disc? How do you guys author blu rays without having to pay for such activations, or are these unavoidable?
Thanks in advance--
SW

Isn't it interesting that US$79 Nero gives you DD at no additional cost but it costs nearly US$300 in CS? I smell a cash cow for Adobe. (grin)

You should be able to use non-DD audio on BD. I've done three BD projects without the benefit of the DD plug-in and they all came out aces. But I used h.264.

I wonder if the MPEG-2/PCM combination isn't kosher for BD. Can you change your output to h.264 with PCM and see if that works? I'm not deep with either knowledge or experience in the BD realm, but my impression is that there are more options when encoding to h.264.

Yeah, I tried going the H.264 route, and got the same thing! I can't believe it. This wasn't an issue back in the old Premiere Pro 1.5.1 days....

Strangely, in the CS3 Production Premium suite, Encore encodes Dolby without additional activation or fees. So you can just encode the video to Blu-ray specs, and export the audio as a PCM file, then use Encore to author the Blu-ray title. You can set Encore to not re-encode the video, while re-encoding the audio to Dolby.

PCM audio is kosher for Blu-ray, regardless of the video codec selected.

Tom

Yea... that's an odd one. Perhaps it's a bug! (grin)

Just to add my 2 cents...
Premiere used Mainconcept to encode the video and audio...I believe it's Mainconcept that's holding you hostage to audio encoding. Premiere's just the middleman.

That's why Encore is way more convenient. But what do i know...I'm still on 2.0.

Peter - Main Concept provides Adobe with the video codecs, but the Surcode codec in Premiere comes from Minnetonka Audio.