Is Mac still the industry leader? NO BLU RAY!?!?

[Jason Steele]

I will admit i might be in a PANIC but i just bought a loaded Mac Pro for video produciton (i shoot weddings and low budget shorts) and I bought the latest versions of what i THOUGHT was the leading software in this industry, Final Cut Pro Studio 3 and Adobe Production Premium.
so if Mac is soooo ontop of things why don't they have a blu ray burner!?!?!?!
what good is shooting a wedding in HD if i can't burn it to a blu ray disc for playback????
final cut pro 4.5 was called final cut pro HD!!!!!! for gods sakes. what good is it if you can't put it on a viewable hard copy????????

VERY confused. should i take this Mac Pro back without even opening the box? cuz i know PC's can read and write Blu rays....?
what are current wedding videographers using to create HD video for clients...?

i am such a newb, but very perplexed. pissed i just spent all this money on a technology NOT supported by the very machine i bought to use it on. DAMMIT. -STEELE

[Khoi Pham]

If you take it back, check out Grass Valley Edius, with a fast PC, you can get many effects and layers realtime, easy to use, realtime full resolution output to HDTV so you can see and grade your footage, make basic Blu-ray disc with menu straight from the timeline or output Blu-ray files for other authoring program like Encore, Tmpgenc, DVDitpro HD..., I have made probably around 70 Blu-ray disc so far with it, and with the latest Edius 5.2, I have a dual quadcore and when rendering for Blu-ray all 8 cores max out, very nice.

[Colin McDonald]

Jason, there has been some discussion here about this and some suggestions for solutions. Have a look at some of these threads on blu ray and mac:
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/non-line...g-blu-ray.html
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/non-line...-done-mac.html
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/non-line...3bks-os-x.html

[Robert Lane]

Jason,

Trust me when I say you're not the only one with the same level of frustration. However with all you've just purchased you've got everything you need to make BR discs, as Encore can author really good-looking discs.

I know it's absolutely insane, that you can't view a BR disc of any kind yet on a Mac but considering the wealth of software you've just purchased you've got one hell of an edit suite on your hands.

Here's what I would do: Keep what you have, get a copy of Vista 64 and install it on a BootCamp partition. Also purchase a BR burner and install it in your Mac Pro; Encore will talk to BR burners on the Mac side as will Toast and other apps - but again once it's burned you just can't *view* it in Mac OSX. If you need to do BR-related operations that the Mac side can't just boot into Windows and do it there.

At least with the Mac Pro you've got the best of both worlds; if you get a PC you're stuck with a PC-only environment.

Welcome to the forums; we'll be here when you hit bumps in the road.

[William Hohauser]

I'll add one thing here. Get a BluRay player and check your disks on a television. Just because it plays on a computer doesn't mean that the disk will play on a BluRay player. Computer drives tend to be more lenient with media playback than many models of entertainment system players.

Right now I'm working on a multiple BluRay player installation but the harried producers haven't checked whether all the players (many different brands and models) can play BD-R, we'll do that tomorrow. Encore made a nice test disk, we'll see.

A question: how do you get the share function in FCP7 to recognize the external BluRay drive? It kept trying to burn on the internal DVD drive.

[Robert Lane]

Originally Posted by William Hohauser

A question: how do you get the share function in FCP7 to recognize the external BluRay drive? It kept trying to burn on the internal DVD drive.

I've never tested an external BR burner, only internal.

[Olof Ekbergh]

I have been making Blurays on Macs now for more than a year. I use a Firewire external to burn discs.

I have been doing SD DVD's for more than 10 years now, when I first started blanks were more than $50.00 and I bought 2 PC systems that could not manage to make DVD's that worked in players of the day, at $50.00 per trial DVD that was expensive. I finally bought Sonic Scenarist for Mac and every DVD was perfect. I still use the DVD burner ($4,500.00) for authoring, not general media, to make masters for duplications. As a matter of fact the very same G3 still works fine.

These days Bluray is a world of hurt as Steve said. Even Disc Makers™ a leading duplicator service I just had a conversation with about a Bluray duplication project are in a quandary about all the fees and how inconsistent all the specs are.

The bottom line is I bought my own duplicator with printer in order to produce the DVD's for this client. About 100-500 a month possible more. This is all running perfectly on my one of my Macs.

I author either using the new share in FCP 7, the first time I tried this it worked perfectly. I don't even have any drivers installed for the FW Bluray (Lacie) burner, FCP just sees it and burns to it. I have a 4 year old Sony BD player and a new Samsung both play those discs perfectly.

The other way I author is Toast™ this allows you to make more complex menus and I have been using it most of the time. It is possible that drivers that work with FCP7 were installed with Toast and that is why I have no problems with FCP seeing the burner.

My point is Bluray is really bleeding edge, so expect problems, maybe I am more tolerant because I remember all the expense and frustrations of being on the bleeding edge for so long.

I must also say that the Mac solutions out there that are real work really well, I can't say that about "the dark side".

I am very happy with the way Bluray works on a Mac. And so are my clients.

I will also add that the only way to review a DVD's blue or red, is on a bunch of different players and TV's / monitors (I use my local Video Hi-Fi dealer for this). My edit suites all have Pro HD and SD monitors both CRT (to check how interlaced screen treats footage) and LCD and we also have a Big Plasma and multiple LCD monitors for final comparison.

[Robert Lane]

Olof's workflow and image-checking strategies are perfect examples of how a sustainable workflow is possible for either DVD or BR.

About a year ago I posted a workflow - way before FCP7 was out - on how even in FCS2 there is a preset in Compressor for BR encoding (only for creating the encode, not burning a disc) and in fact Adobe created a workflow around using Compressor's encodes to be imported into Encore.

To reiterate Olof's point: BR is absolutely possible on a Mac and has been for some time, it's only now that Apple has created their own - albeit minor - application for actually creating a BR disc.

Be sure to re-read how Olof is checking his finished material; even today having a CRT-type monitor is critical in finding out how scan-lines affect imagery since the majority of TV sets in home-use today are still tube-type and not LCD or plasma.

[Mitchell Lewis]

Here are 60 new Blu-Ray templates just released for FCP 7.

The home for pro users of Final Cut Studio - fcp-blu-ray-templates

[Jason Steele]

glad i can come to a place with such a wealth of knowledge!
ok, i am gonna make this thing work.
i am interestede to see if blu ray takes off and for how long it will exist before everything is tapeless.

THANKS for posting those threads that cover some of this subject.
feeling much better bout things.... ;-) -STEELE

[William Hohauser]

Just to complete what the story of my BluRay project. Half of the BluRay players couldn't play BD-R discs. I learned that Encore's default encoding setting is at the lowest possible quality for BluRay (at least that's where it ended up after an update). And most importantly the clients cheaped out after adding up the cost of creating BluRay discs with a professional and decided to do it themselves by staying up for 24 hours straight burning discs on their laptop.