Blu-ray Burning with Toast 9

"Taming the Wild Blu, yonder... " By Bruce Nazarian

"Taming the Wild Blu, part 2..." By Bruce Nazarian

Two good articles that cover the Blu-ray burning featues of Toast 9 on Macs. The first article covers the basics of burning Blu-ray and has a good tutorial on burning a Blu-ray data disc. We are currently using Toast 8 to burn Blu-ray discs to archive movies and old FCP projects as data. For some reason, I can't get Toast 9 to recognize our burner, but Toast 8 works fine for this--this tutorial will still help if you are trying to figure out how to burn a BD with Toast 8. There's a new version of Toast 9 out, 9.0.4, which I need to try out--hopefully the problems with the BD drive will go away. Recently, I blogged about a video tutorial that covers similar ground as this article.

The second article gets you into creating a Blu-ray discs with high-def video. So you've got your snazzy HD camcorder, but how are you going to playback your next high-def project? Apple isn't really helping you out--you can't playback video from Blu-ray discs on your Mac (much less author a Blu-ray disc with their software.) But this article points out the other options, namely Blu-ray players, which already cost less than $200.

Toast 9 does basic authoring of Blu-ray video discs. Simple menus, encoding of video to MPEG-2 or H.264, and, of course, burning your Blu-ray disc (or even regular DVD if you have about 20 minutes of video or less.)

Don't forget about Adobe's Encore CS3, and now CS4, which I blogged about earlier this year. Encore has a much more sophisticated tools for authoring Blu-ray discs than Toast's. But for simple discs, Toast looks like an easy way to put your high-def video onto disc.

September Blogwad

Hard Disk Warning!
Larry Jordan says don't leave a hard drive sitting on your shelf for more than a year with data that you want to keep. Explains why and gives some suggestions on how to keep old hard drives from losing data.

The Freesound Project
Sound effects here. They are available under Creative Commons licenses. Not sure if that would include any of Link's work. As I understand it, Creative Commons means that you aren't doing the project for money and your work will also be available to others under the Creative Commons agreement. But I'm not an expert.

DA Font
Some fonts here some are in the public domain, others are available under Creative Commons licenses. Again, I'm not an expert in Creative Commons licensing. But public domain is obviously cool.

Ripple Training
Some good tutorials in the Ripple Training section of the ProVideo Coaltion website.
Remove the Jitters - Covers the SmoothCam feature in Final Cut Pro 6.
Photoshop & Motion - Simple way to do a quick animation on a multi-layered Photoshop document in Motion 3 by using its 3D features.
Color Workflows With Different Video Formats - Covers how to use different codecs with Color. Warning here about working with Long-GOP formats, like HDV.

HDV video to SD DVD Using Compressor 3 and DVD SP
Exporting HDV Video from the Timeline to Standard Definition DVD
Man, working with HDV can be slow. Hopefully these tutorials will save you some time if you need to make a DVD from some HDV footage. They are over at kenstone.net
Also at kenstone.net, a tutorial on making a Blu-ray high-def video disc on a Mac. Takes you from FCP through Compressor to Adobe's Encore:
Blu-ray with Final Cut Pro, Compressor and Encore

ProRes 422 was one of the big features of Final Cut Pro 6. It was essentially a QuickTime codec, but Apple wasn't going to give it away. Too bad, because it's an efficient codec and very useful, especially for high-def footage. Well, Apple is finally letting people playback ProRes 422 footage on systems without FCP 6 installed (but you still can't create ProRes files without FCP 6.) Here are the links to playback ProRes on Mac's and PC's.

Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk
I didn't know you could do this:
You can make a "universally bootable" external hard disk that will work with both Mac OS X 10.5-compatible PowerPC-based Macs and Intel-based Macs.

Bluetooth Earpiece--2-way radio
Do production? Need to buy a bluetooth head set? Then consider the Dragon. It will work as a 2-way radio with another Dragon headset. They even sell a device that will allow you to link up to 5 Dragon headsets together. Probaby not the cheapest way to communicate with a crew, but it's nice that it will do double-duty as the wireless headset for you cellphone.


Making Compressor Multiprocessor Aware
This one of Larry Jordan's Tips of the Day. Uses QMaster to make virtual clusters on multi-processor systems.

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

Blu-ray and Macs

As I've said before on this blog, Apple isn't giving Blu-ray any love. No drives, no playback, no authoring software. Apple is supposed to offer some support for burning Blu-ray data discs now, but Apple has been slow to jump on the next-gen for optical media (remember how Apple was out in front with DVD players in their computers back in the day?).

Right now, 3rd party software is providing support for burning. Toast 8 and 9 let you burn data Blu-ray. Toast 9 is supposed to let you burn high-def video to Blu-ray that will playback on Blu-ray players. But Adobe's Encore, part of Production Premium CS3, is now the best solution for putting high-def video onto Blu-ray. With a Blu-ray burner on the way to Link TV, and a copy of CS3 Production Premium available, we are on our way to burning our first Blu-ray discs. (Now if I can only convince my boss to buy a high-def TV and a PS3, so we could play the darn things.)

Adobe can encode your video for you, but there's a recent blog post Apple's Compressor & Encore Blu-Ray from Adobe that helps you figure out how to encode your high-def in Compressor. Adobe gets kudos for playing well with others. They don't pretend like they are the end-all and be-all of post-production software and that anything you would ever want to do can be done on their software. And I like the concept of an Adobe blog as a personable way to distribute info about software. The closest thing Apple gets to providing updated info on their software is their antiseptic support documents.

Adobe can't find a way to get h.264 encoding from Compressor working with Blu-ray, so they are using MPEG-2 encoding. Adobe will encode your high-def to h.264 for you, but it's nice not to have to do an export of your entire high-def show before you even start to encode.

I found this blog post over at Final Cut User who is also bemoaning Apple's lame response to Blu-ray.

FCP's Competition--Avid & Adobe

Big news from Avid today. The cost of the software-only version of Media Composer has been cut in half to $2500. And they are killing Xpress Pro.

I haven't worked on Avid in over 5 years now. So I can't really comment on how it measures up now to Final Cut Pro. IMHO, I don't think this is going to upend Final Cut Pro's dominance. But it may help Avid from losing too much more market share. They are also offering an educational license of Media Composer for $295. For owners of Xpress Pro, you can upgrade for $500.

Good commentary on these blogs about the latest news from Avid:
ProVideo Coalition
HD for Indies
Studio Daily Blog

I'm about to get a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium. I'm getting it is as a swap. Unlike Avid and Apple, Adobe has a non-profit pricing. So Production Premium CS3 retails for $1700, but the non-profit price is under $600. When you look at everything that's in the Production Premium, it's a competitive product. Here are the apps:
After Effects CS3 Professional
Premiere Pro CS3 (runs on Intel Macs but not PowerPC Macs, e.g., G5's)
Encore CS3
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Flash CS3 Professional
Illustrator CS3
Soundbooth CS3
Device Central
Ultra CS3 (Windows Only)
OnLocation CS3 (Windows or Bootcamp)

Afters Effects and Photoshop Extended each cost $1000 retail if you buy them separately. So the bundle has some value. When you compare what Apple is offering for $1300, it leaves me wanting more from Final Cut Studio. While I'm very happy with Final Cut Pro, Apple needs to do more work on the secondary apps. Color has bad buzz for being unstable. I know Motion 2 left a lot to be desired in reliability and performance--I'm hoping that once I start working with Motion 3, I'll be happier. And no update for DVD Studio Pro when Final Cut Studio 2 came out. What is up with that Apple? I'm still holding out hope that Apple's waiting until they can introduce a Blu-ray burner in their laptops and then they are going to announce support for authoring Blu-ray discs in Final Cut Studio. But I wouldn't hold your breath. Adobe's Encore CS3 already does Blu-ray authoring. (Recently Toast 9 was announced with support for authoring Blu-ray video discs.) The fact that the MacBook Air doesn't even come with a DVD drive makes me worried that Steve Jobs thinks that the iTunes Store means that no one needs a disc to watch video anymore--or reading between the lines, Blu-ray is just competition for Steve's dominating video like he dominates music.

The things I'm most looking forward to in After Effects CS3 are better performance and 3D text effects. But frankly, I'll probably never even try out Adobe Premiere. I worked on it ages ago and felt burned. I'm happy with Final Cut Pro and it's not worth it for me to learn a new app when I don't know that if it's as powerful and reliable than FCP (much less better.) Not to mention the advantage Final Cut Pro has by being the de facto editing package for the type of work that I do.

Apple TV Take 2

"Take 2" is what Apple is calling the forthcoming updates to their Apple TV product. I consider this an acknowledgment that take 1 didn't cut it, and I think they have gone a long way towards overcoming the problems of Apple TV (and also have made it a more promising distribution format for Link TV while they were at it.)

There are 3 big updates to Apple TV: 1) Movie rentals (before you could only buy movies or load your own through a cumbersome encoding process) 2) HD movie rentals (finally real HD content for a device that was effectively designed only for HD displays) 3) you can add content without using a computer at all. As for one and two, these make the Apple TV a compelling product--movie rentals starting at $3 without leaving your home, or even the couch. Luckily for Apple, the consumer electronics corporations (including Microsoft) have basically wasted the last year with a battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD. It now seems Blu-ray is the winner, but meanwhile Apple has added HD movies to the Apple TV with support from all the movies studios. Currently, Universal and Paramount do not support Blu-ray and are HD DVD exclusive. On the other hand, movies are available on Apple TV 30 days after the discs are released (it's also not clear to me that every movie will be available on Apple TV.) Starting at $239 for a 40GB Apple TV, it is cheaper than any of the Blu-ray players.

In summary, I think Apple TV is now a compelling device for a significant amount of consumers. As I wrote when it first was announced last year in this post, Apple TV gets podcasts, like Mosaic, directly to the TV set. Now with the new update to Apple TV, podcasts can be browsed and watched from the sofa. In the first generation of Apple TV, podcasts had to be downloaded on a computer then synced to the Apple TV. Now we can search and browse through all of the podcasts on the iTunes Store directly on the Apple TV--then start playing a podcast immediately once you find something interesting. I think this will really help bring podcasts to the TV screen.

Visit this page for a simple demonstration on how you can browse and watch podcasts through the Apple TV.

"iTunes and Apple TV rentals and purchases: what you can (and can't) do"
One drawback with the Apple TV is that it's confusing about what kind of content you can watch where--the article gives you the lowdown on what's doable with the new rental and HD content on Apple TV

Apple TV Guided Tour Have no idea what I'm talking about? Watch this movie by Apple to understand what it does.

"The Big Picture: Apple's methodical moves show it takes time to change the world." Apple not only has to negotiate with the studios, face off competition from the consumer electronics companies and Microsoft, but could run into some trouble with the broadband providers and Google. Bob Cringely expresses concerns about Apple's approaches in this article.

P.S., I also think this means no Blu-ray support on Mac's for the foreseeable future, including Blu-ray authoring in DVD Studio Pro. That sucks.

P.P.S. Movie rentals are available in iTunes without Apple TV.

P.P.P.S. However, don't install the new QuickTime, which is required for rentals, on a system with After Effects. QuickTime 7.4 screws up AE rendering. "Thanks Again Apple"

Apple Updates the Mac Pro

Apple has refreshed the Mac Pro--the first full turnover of the Mac Pro since it was first announced in August of 2006. The line has switched from being dominated by Quad-core Xeon's to being dominated by Octo-core Xeon's. There was an uptick in price for the recommended system from $2500 to $2800 for an 8-core 2.8 GHz Xeon Mac Pro.

There are some other improvements in the system architecture and early results show good improvements in system performance. While adding 4 more cores doesn't double the speed, these systems look signficantly faster than older Mac Pro's, especiallly in encoding video. Check out this benchmark test from MacWorld for more info:
"From the Lab: Internal changes bolster latest Mac Pro"
I was surprised at what low marks they gave the internal hard drive that ships with the new Mac. I've always assumed that those had decent performance, but MacWorld found a significant speed bump on their multi-app test by putting a hard drive from an older Mac Pro into the current 8-core 2.8 GHz Xeon. For some good specs on hard drive performance, check out Bare Feats. Apple also has some performance comparisons with other Mac towers here, including rendering & encoding with FCP and After Effects.

There had been rumors that Apple was ready to add a Blu-ray drive for playing back high-def movies to the Mac Pro's. For PC's, adding an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive, or both, is now a common option. Nothing from Apple about Blu-ray for these new computers, but an announcement could come at the MacWorld Conference. I'm anxious to see Apple add Blu-ray disc authoring to DVD Studio Pro, as well as decent support for the HD DVD standard. Adobe's Encore already does this. Commentator Bob Cringely suggests that Jobs will ignore high-def discs because he sees them as a threat to iTunes ruling the media world in his latest column (he also thinks Apple will buy Adobe, which seems a bit far-fetched to me.)

iFlop

Just to prove I'm not a shill for Apple, here are a couple of their recent disappointments.

Back at NAB, Apple announced that Final Cut Server would be available by the summer of 2007. I gave it a positive plug at the time. Well summer came and went with nary another peep from Apple about Final Cut Server. Recently, Apple added to the FCS webpage a release date of "early 2008". I'm guessing we won't see it again until NAB 2008. Apple isn't known for vaporware, but this is a prime example.

"iFlop"
While I don't agree with everything in this article from Forbes, the Apple TV has had a disappointing run. While expecting it to become the iPod of the television might have been pushing it, even Steve Jobs went on to call the Apple TV a mere "hobby". Here is one of my old plugs for Apple TV where I hoped it would become a great platform the video podcasts like our Mosaic.

For me one of the big problems is that the product is basically designed only for high-def TV's, but Apple doesn't really have any high-def content. My guess is that this isn't mainly Apple's fault. I blame the entertainment companies who I think are afraid that Apple will corner the video market like they have cornered the music download market. Universal in particular has been playing hardball with Apple on its NBC TV Shows and and is trying to organize some other record labels for a competing music service. Another big feature missing on Apple TV is movie rentals. Steve Jobs has said that people want to "own" their music (I agree), so is that his view on movies or the entertainment companies'?

Just look at the HD-DVD and Blu-ray fiasco to see an example that the entertainment companies, not to mention the consumer electronics manufacturers, just don't get it. Most of the movies studios are only supporting either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, not both formats. So if you want to watch Universal or Paramont pictures, then buy a HD-DVD player, but if you want Sony, 20th Century Fox, or Disney movies, then get a Blu-ray player. Average consumers would never buy into this crazy scheme. Each company is trying to maximize their own company's advantage to the detriment of the consumer and thus the overall market for high-def movies. For music, it took an explosion of illegal downloads, to scare the record labels into all buying into Apple's music store. Here's one advocate for doing the same thing for video ("Apple TV Fails to Tap the Net's Limitless Library").

Not that Apple is blameless in the content world. Apple will not let other hardware manufacturers make products that will work with iTunes or play content with Apple's DRM for music or video. And Apple won't add support for content from other DRM schemes on their hardware. When it comes down to it, Apple is probably just as evil as Microsoft or the entertainment companies would be. But at least Apple's products are nearly all universally strong in interface, ease-of-use, quality, and reliability.