Production tip: BluRay discs without a BD burner via Adobe Encore

With the Blu-Ray made the winner of the HD media war, burners have now dropped in price but nothing like DVD+/-R,RW, DL which we still have.

For those not ready to go to BluRay burners yet, there is a way to get good quality HD clips on normal red laser DVDs. Right now, Adobe's Encore is the only authoring application for BluRay that is dual platform. So I'll talk about doing it on Encore in this tip:

In Encore, author your project in HD as per usual but a few things to note:

• Make sure your bit rate is under 11mbps, optimally 9 mbps VBR. This is near the limit of redlaser. Do test the bit rate on a RW before burning to commiting to a R or DL media.
  
• Instead of burning to media, set output to Blu Ray Image under the Encore Build menu. Ensure that the build size is less the 4.1GB for single sided DVD or 8 GB for DL.
  
• You can use Encore or even Toast to burn the DVD using the burner in your computer.
  

The quality will NOT be actual HD quality but it'll look awesome compared to normal MPEG2 DVD. You can play it on PS3 or any other BD player. Your normal DVD player may be able to play it IF it supports H264 codec.

There are other ways of doing things including saving the files to the PS3 hard disk and play it directly from there. You are not as limited with bit rates there, esp if you have a 80GB PS3.

Update: Toast 9 (which is also dual platform) supports Blu-Ray burning as well.

For Windows folks, Nero does AVCHD as well.

The problem I've had with doing this in Toast is a bug in their generated menu code. If I have one clip on the disk and a menu, at the end of the clip, it rewinds and plays a small portion of the end of the clip again, before it'll cycle back to the menu. Very irritating. I have no idea if this happens with BD disks as well.

With no menu, it's fine.

Linda

Well I shall also add that the PC based DVDit Pro HD program can make both a Blu_Ray and normal DVD's from the same project.

You can also author a mini Blu-Ray and burn it to normal DVD-r disks.

It also has it's own built in encoder so if you use non Blu_Ray or DVD spec files it will encode it for you.

Once you have made you projects you can compile it to an ISO file and burn it to a Blu_Ray or normal DVD-R disk.

For a normal DVD-r disk you can use any burner software that can burn an ISO file.

For a Blu_Ray disk you can use any software that can burn an ISO to a Blu_Ray disk.

It can also burn straight to the disks.

You may also find that your Blu_Ray playing software may not play the compiled Blu_Ray on your hard drive, it has to be burn't to a disk...... Maybe a Hollywood copy thing I suppose.

Drew the Mini Blu_Ray I made with CBR of 25mbps - 1440/1080 MPEG2 plays fine on normal DVD-r red disks here.

I played it on my computers Blu_Ray drive, a 3 year old LG DVD burner and a 4 year old Pioneer DVD burner.