Which settings in Toast 10 for Bluray burning?
 

I have to burn a Bluray disk of a Quicktime Movie in ProRes422, 25 progressive, 35 megabit variable bit rate. The disk will be played on a Panasonic Bluray player and shown on a LCD-flatscreen, true 25p and full HD. Could anyone tell me what are the best suited coded settings in Toast 10? I'm looking for the best image quality with no artefacts.

How long is the QT movie?

Well, actually there are two movies: one of 10 minutes and one of 32 minutes. They can be burnt on two separate disks.

Well, you could put both those movies on one single-sided 25GB Blu-ray Disc at the maximum bit-rate = 26Mbps (with a lot of room to spare).

You can't go higher than that bitrate, as that would be outside the BD spec, and a set-top player would choke. Toast will have to re-encode your super-quality original, but I don't think you'll be disappointed with the quality at 26Mbps.

OK, Martin, I'll choose 'custom' and take the maximum bitrate: 26 Mbit/sec
How should the other settings in that pane be, ideally? :

- Format: MPEG 4 AVC, I presume?
- Re-encoding: 'automatic', 'always' or 'never'?
- Field dominance: 'Automatic', 'Top field first', 'Bottom field first' or 'progressive'? I remember I tried 'progressive' before and got a lot of 'combing' artefacts when panning.

Thanks!
Luc

Yes, MPEG4 AVC.
And I would leave the others all on Auto, and carefully view the results on a set-top DVD player connected by HDMI to an HD-Ready TV.

I would be worried that you shot in 25p - as I personally don't like 25p at all - but that's just me. I shoot 50i and prefer the smooth motion.

Frankly, if you get artefacts on vertical edges when slow panning, that's what I would expect from 25p. Why DID you shoot 25p in the first place??!!

Well, mostly because I'm only viewing my movies on apparatuses that build up their image in a purely progressive way, like plasma and LCD-flatscreens. I tried interlaced before and had lots of de-interlacing artefacts. Most people on this forum also advise progressive, so I trusted their advice...

Martin,

I did some testing with interlaced yesterday and as you point out, even fast pans are perfectly smooth. Guess I'll have to reconsider my 25p habit... Although the result looked a little less sharp.