Problems with blu-ray creation in compressor
 

Hi folks. I have been trying to use the blu-ray job action in compressor with some big difficulties. My general workflow is 1080 30p preres footage in FCP-->selfcontained pro res .mov-->import to compressor and use the blu-ray H.264 presets*--> to .img file for burning to disk in toast. *I created a template for blu-ray by doing a share and send to compressor from FCP, before starting this. Then closed everything, and opened the template in compressor and went from there. I have set it for 26 Mbps ave, 356 Mbps max bitrate using multi-pass.

Problem 1- On my 1 hour disk, all worked, except I ended up with a bunch of extra chapter markers that I can not explain. They are at about the 50 minute mark in a 60 minute movie. I do not have any extra markers beyond my intended chapter markers in FCP, so I can not find an explanation for this.

Problem 2- On the 2-hour disk (1:55), compressor output the H.264 and ac3 files, but failed on the disk creation. I had never had this happen in all of my testing, and creating of shorter (5-15 minute disks) previously.

I am kind of stuck with where to go next. It took 28 hours to make the first disk and 48 hours to make the second and I can not keep repeating these encodes to test willy-nilly. If I do short versions, all looks fine and works as intended.

Any ideas for me to chase this down?

Right now, I am trying to get Toast to do the disks using my H.264 and ac3 files, and am trying to work out getting chapters to work there. This seems like a quicker way to get something out to my customer, although I really want what compressor should be able to give me as it can make chapter menus with names for the chapters (Toast does not). Uggh.

Due to some other odd errors that I am getting and odd behavior in Compressor, I am beginning to think that it is Qmaster that is causing the issues. I hate to do it, but at some point, I will redo this long transcode without a Qmaster cluster in play. I bailed on H.264 and am doing MPEG2 instead to save some time. I think the quality will be acceptable (I hope). If not, I am going to probably farm out blu-ray to someone with Encore.

Whoa it took 28 hours to make a blu ray??? Sounds like Toast is re compressing and perhaps your errors are due to that. A mix up on metadata here and there sort of thing.

Someone might know the answer to this but I believe Compressor lacks the ability to make truly blu-ray "legal" h.264 streams. I would just send a quicktime reference to Toast and let it ride. That or get the trial version of Premiere and Encore and make the disk there, you can go higher on the bitrate as well.

Actually, the ultra-long encode was all in compressor, but it was due to a problem with QMaster. I sorted that out and my speeds are back up to normal (although I wish they were still faster, but that won't happen on this machine).