Advice Needed - My Tower Came With 2 Burners...
 

I'm currently doing dual layer discs. My DVD duplicator can not duplicate dual layer, so, I'd like to use the 2 burners in my tower to make dups. How do I do that? BTW, using DVDsp.
Can I do it in that environment? Toast, maybe? Thanks.

If you're looking to make straight duplications of a DVD-DL, Apple's Disk Utility or Roxio's Toast is the way to go. Disk Utility is already a part of your system, so there's no need to buy Toast if you don't have it.

But how my friend? I do have Toast, and disc utility, of course. What are the steps for each, if you know them. Thank you.

Insert disk in DVD "Player" and once mounted, launch Toast and drag the image (disk icon) into Toast. Click the big red burn button and toast and your done.

It can be done with a single burner by mounting the disk and creating a "Disk Image" and then ejecting the disk when the Disk Image is done. Launch Toast and drag the Disk Image to Toast and click the big red burn button.

My tower came with TWO burners. Will they both automatically burn at the same time?

They should be capable of burning at the same-time, it's just a matter of getting the software to do it.

If you get an image of what you want to burn, you should be able to simultaneously burn 2 disks with 1 image off the HDD.

Here's how you do it (I do this all the time on our MacPro 8-core Intel machine):

1) Go into your Application folder and find the Toast application.
2) Rename the Toast app "Toast-1"
3) With the app still selected type "command-D" on your keyboard to duplicate the application.
3) Re-name the duplicate "Toast-2"
4) Drag both applications into your Dock so you have easy access to them
5) Launch Toast-1, then when Toast-1 is finished launching, launch Toast-2
6) If you're using Toast version 8 Titanium, you assign which application talks to which drive by clicking on the little star to the left of the big red record button. You'll see both your drives listed. Choose one of the drives with Toast-1 and the other drive with Toast-2
7) You're all set. Now, setup your data how you want it in each application window (the date can be the same in each app or different...doesn't matter)
8) Burn discs as you would normally.

The only caveat with this technique is opening/closing disc drawers. Hold down the option key when ejecting the second disk drawer. But then I'll just gently press on either drawer to close them.

Also, you want to start one drive burning slightly before the other. That way you're not having to load a disc in the second tray while the first tray is open (hard to get to it)

Good luck! :)

So Mitch, first I make a regular DVD burn. Then take a disc image and do your technique?
Thank you for that thoughtful explanation.

Nope. Just burn both discs the exact same way.

So let's say you're burning 20 DVD's using a VIDEO_TS folder created by DVDStudioPro. You want all 20 DVD's to be exactly the same, but you want to take advantage of both disc drives to cut your burning time in half.

1) Launch both Toast applications (Toast-1 and the duplicate Toast-2) from your Dock (after steps 1-4 from my previous post)
2) Position the windows so you can see both of them on your computer monitor
3) Select the type of disc you want to burn inside both application windows. In this case select DVD-ROM (UDF)
4) Make sure each Toast application is assigned to a corresponding burner (step 6 from my previous post)
5) Click the big red record button on both applications
6) Type in that you want 10 copies burned in each application (total of 20 copies)
7) Click RECORD

You're all set.

In summary, all you have done is duplicated the Toast application so you have two versions of running at the same time. When I originally heard about this, I didn't think it would work, but it's been working great for 1.5 years now. Never burned one bad disc. I am using an 8-core MacPro, so the multiple processors probably help a lot. But I'm guessing that even with a 2 or 4-processor Mac you'd be fine using this technique.

J

Mitch, so, let DVDsp just do the build, and let toast handle the burn with the TS folders?
Thank you once again, looking forward to trying this.

That's correct. But this doesn't only work for DVD's, you can burn any type of disc you want. Heck you could burn a DVD in one drive and an Audio CD in the other. Just think of it as two separate Toast applications, one assigned to each burner.

Have fun! :)