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.

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