Elephant in the Room
 

How does one make a hidef, blu-ray DVD with our lovely new camera?

First thing that comes to mind is Adobe Encore, PC or Mac.

Sorry, but this thread title is not going to be very useful in future searches, 'ya know? ;)

1. Drop video on timeline
2. Render video to chosen format
3. Load video into chosen BluRay compatibleDVD Burning software
4. Burn BluRay


What part has you confused?

Render video to chosen format? What do you mean? I'm editing 1080i in the timeline, and want to make a 1080i bluray disc.

What software for a Mac do I need? I hear DVDsp doesn't support BluRay.

You are right, DVDSP doesn't support BluRay yet (hopefully it will soon). So for now, you can do what Ned said and use Adobe Encore, or Toast Titanium 9 if you don't mind real simple menus. Those are pretty much your only choices for now on a Mac as far as I know.

Mac and Bluray
 

Mac? Depends which model you own. All newer ones run on an Intel processor,
so they are Win compatible. Both operating systems, OS X and Win, side by side,
if you wish to do so. However, Adobe Encore is a different beast. I'd rather stick
to DVDSP Pro and it HD feature for the time being and switch to BD as soon as
it becomes available. I'd also have a try and encode into MP4/H.264 and simply
burn that on a standard DVD-DL which works as a DVD-ROM then.

All that depends on the length of your edited video. But MP4 and HD go very
well together. To have that run smoothly, you need a very powerful computer,
though.

BTW, BD is not as easy to handle as you may think. There are different versions
of BD which go with different licences, you have to choose from. Compared to DVD,
DVD is a very simple thing, while BD is complicated, very complicated. I only know
of people who have used BD successfully, that used Playstation as BD player.
I therefore refrained from BD until now and store HD videos on hard disc or burn
MP4/H.264 encoded HD videos onto DVD or DVD-DL platters.

Hope this helps
P.

P.S.: MPEG4 and MPEG 2 are part of the BluRay Specs. So you may later compile
your encoded MP4 videos onto a BD platter without having to re-encode that
material again. From experience, I do prefer MP4 over MP2. MP4 gives images
that are more crispy.

Do a DVinfo site search for Blu-ray and you will find answers to your questions. There are quite a few of us who have been successfully going from a FCP 2.0, EX1/3 timeline straight into Adobe Encore CS3. While Encore is not intuitive like DVDSP, nor as flexible with encoding, it does a very good job and produces working Blu-ray discs. I use a 2nd generation Sony BWU-200S burner installed in the lower slot of my MacPro 3.2 Octo (Early 2008). No Blu-ray coasters since February 2008, all is stable and plays well together. Some folks claim Encore is unstable in their configuration.

The EX1/3 1080/24p video from FCP to Encore produces pretty good quality BD/BD-RE discs which work properly in my Sony BDP-S300 Home Theatre player. I have also done some 1080/60i projects but prefer 1080/24p video. While the EX1/3 footage does look stunning on my Pioneer Kuro PDP-5010FD, its still got a ways to go to match the video quality on commercial Blu-ray discs from the movie studios.

This stuff is not rocket science, so take heart and proceed with confidence. Ignore, the vague and skeptical comments posted in these forums. As you can tell, they are not helpful and they defeat the purpose of this site. Cheers and good luck :-))

You might have a long wait for DVDSP Blu-ray support as I believe it is a licensing issue as opposed to a software coding issue. Sony are very protective of their expensive Blu-ray authoring licences.

How powerful though? Would an 8 core, 2.8GHz Mac Pro with 16GB be able to handle this?

Jus.

One of the Mac rumors sites has a little blurb about the "possibility" of BluRay coming to the Mac in OS 10.5.6....along with some other stuff:

New iPod Nano, iPod Touch, iTunes 8.0, and Blu-Ray in OS X 10.5.6? - Mac Rumors

Again, rumor, but I think that it might coincide with the release of some updated Cinema Display monitors as they could include the HDCP protections that Hollywood wants. Otherwise, you'd be viewing a down-res'd version of any commercial BD disk you might want to play (assuming that there MIGHT be a few people here who use their computers for something OTHER than work). ;-)

Blu Ray on a Mac with Encore
 

While it is true you can make a Blu Ray disc using Encore CS3 on a Mac there are application issues and Adobe has been unable to fix it. Specifically, if you make a disc with menus and buttons, they don't work. It looks fine in preview mode but when you burn it, they're not active. If you want to make a disc that automatically starts playing and you don't need chapters, you're ok.

I found this out the hard way. Encore works fine on a PC.

BTW: I have an Intel Mac.

This has not the case with my configuration as I specified above and moreover Encore is stable with no crashes. Menu's-Buttons-Chapters work as advertised. I have Adobe's Master CS3 applications installed on my MacPro 3.2 Octo 16GB ram, Leopard 10.5.4 and with all of Adobe's current CS3 updates. I also keep my Sony Blu-ray burner and Sony Blu-ray player firmware up-to-date both of which by the way are "user downloadable and user installable" from official/credible Sony web sites! So go figure???

That being said, you are not the first to indicate that it will not work in your configuration. Perhaps it's the Blu-ray burner, perhaps its the Blu-ray player, perhaps as you say there is an Adobe issue.

If you have a Mac and PC you are good to go. I edit in FCP, export as a quicktime movie, open the quitime up in quicktime player, get rid of the wrapper by exporting it as a mp4 passthrough, transfer it over to the PC, import into architect 5, make the blu-ray dvd and burn out with ful motion menues and chapters on my blu ray LG H20L burner.


Perfect results even if a convoluted workflow!!!

Blu Ray on a Mac
 

Barry, I'm aware that Encore does work for some, but when I called Adobe technical support they were aware of the problem and said engineers were working on it. So, like you said, go figure? So for now, I'll edit on a Mac, use Compressor to encode and burn with Encore on a PC, til they get it figured out.

BTW I do not have the Master CS3 applications, just Premiere Pro and Encore, burning to a Lacie external firewire drive...and Leopard.