Blu-ray Burning 101

Not sure if everyone really knows about the Blu-ray burner that we have. We bought the OWC Mercury Pro 2x Blu-ray Panasonic SW-5582. It's an external burner that burns 25GB and 50GB over firewire. Right now it's hooked up to the G4 that interns have been working with.

We got it to back up data mostly. Blu-ray is more reliable than a hard-drive and 25GB is decent capacity for backing up video files. We are hoping to use it to free up some of our hard drives that are sitting around not getting used because of old projects that no one wants to delete.

The discs aren't cheap, around $10, but it's reasonable, especialy when you consider that it's a robust, easy-to-use archiving solution.

So how do you use it? I'm not going to into all of the setup here (if you are interested ask me), but there's a video that covers burning discs in the Mac's Finder and with Toast. This video shows Toast 9, but we use Toast 8, and it works pretty much the same (I think the main difference is that they tweaked the interface.)

MacVideo: Step into Blu-ray - for less than £200

I looked for that drive mentioned in the video and couldn't find it. This guy is British, and I couldn't find anything as comparably cheap or anything with the same model number in the States. Remember folks, the dollar is a currency on the wane, eventually our greenbacks aren't going to go as far when buying all those imported, electronics.

Now, you can't watch any blu-ray movies on Macs. Apple needs to add support for that both in hardware and the operating system, and as I've written before Apple has made no announcement indicating that they will support Blu-ray movie playback at all. However, you can author Blu-ray movies using Adobe's Encore software on an Intel Mac. Right now we have that up and running on the new Octo-core Intel Mac Pro that Hiawatha uses. But until Link gets a Blu-ray player or a Playstation 3, then we don't have any way to playback those Blu-ray movies. (I'm all for getting a PS3--how about some Rock Band jamming at the office?)

Here's an article from Adobe discussing workflow for encoding high-def video using Compressor to burn onto Blu-ray using Encore:
Apple's Compressor & Encore Blu-Ray