Blue Ray Burning of Home Movies

Perhaps going over to Roxio's site and looking into Toast specs and any forums might help you . I believe Toast (with the HD plug in or whatever they call it) can do the job. One of the things to check is about compression and audio.

As for burners - you need an external and while not suggesting the specific store you might check out OWC and see what are their offerings. I know that Pioneer, Samsung and LT are some makers that have in the past worked well with OSX. Also, check to see what is your best connection (USB3, Firewire etc.) so you can get the correct unit.

Presently, I happen to use a Pioneer in an external enclosure with FW800 with no issues for reading and writing.

How long are the clips time wise and what device are they being played on? You can burn HD video to regular DVDs using your internal burner that some BR/HD players will play, but you only get maybe 20-30 minutes on a DVD.

If you must use a disk, the best way probably is just to use BluRay. But many of us put video on a USB stick or post them privately on YouTube or another drop box like service for distribution. Many TVs will play HD video from USB sticks or YouTube. You can buy a lot of 8-16GB USB sticks for the price of a burner, software, BR blanks...

I've been burning Blu-rays and DVD's, as well as exporting to youtube and Apple Devices using Apple's Compressor. I edit in FCPX. As long as you've created markers in your video, Compressor allows you to use them as chapter markers, viewable in the top menu of your deck's playback feature. It's not full-featured Authoring, but at least you get the minimum of titled chapters.
I've found Larry Jordan's tutorial on Compressor (and FCP) to be very helpful as well.

I've been making edited HD home movies on Blu-ray using FCPX and Toast 11 with the Blu-ray plugin. I burn the disks using an external LG drive I got at Best Buy for like $150, but that was a few years back. One note: do not use the LTH-type blank BD-R media, as some older Blu-ray players can have problems with them. I've had success with the normal-type Philips media.

Toast works beautifully. One thing to keep in mind is that you need to buy the HD/Bluray plug-in, which is $20 and a separate purchase in addition to whatever you pay for Toast

https://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/plugin/overview.html

I tried Blu-Ray disks for a while with Toast, but nobody gets around to watching them or they don't have a compatible Blu-Ray player. Instead, think about a subscription to Vimeo. You can upload your HD videos with a private viewing password. Everyone will watch them. $50 per year and well worth it.

senseless said:

I tried Blu-Ray disks for a while with Toast, but nobody gets around to watching them or they don't have a compatible Blu-Ray player. Instead, think about a subscription to Vimeo. You can upload your HD videos with a private viewing password. Everyone will watch them. $50 per year and well worth it.

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Ditto that. Optical media is dying out. Increasingly people use computers instead of a TV and many new computers don't have optical drives. They want to play your video on their iPad, not be handed a disc.

With Vimeo you can optionally make it available as a download vs just streaming.

Youtube has unlisted videos that don't require a password. Vimeo has that but I think only for Vimeo Pro which is $200 per year. However the pro version also has portfolios which allow a customizable, ad-free presentation. To some degree that replaces the DVD/Blu-Ray menu system.

For physical media I think just getting bulk 8GB USB thumb drives are better than optical media. The downside is you can't easily put menus or a splash screen on there.

For gifts or commemorative videos, the URL can be packaged with a QR code on a laminated, artistic card. The recipient just scans it and plays the video, without even entering a URL. That provides a tangible item which may increase the perceived value, yet avoids the complexity of mastering optical media.

For living room-style group viewing, increasingly people have Roku, AppleTV, etc so they can get to your web-based video that way. Roku even allows you to sign up as a developer (for free) and make your own private channel. You give your recipients a passcode and they just bring up your channel on Roku.

The $50 annual subscription allows for password protected videos. I prefer Vimeo because the quality and streaming is fast, ad free and high quality.

senseless said:

The $50 annual subscription allows for password protected videos. I prefer Vimeo because the quality and streaming is fast, ad free and high quality.

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Just to clarify, there's a difference between unlisted and password protected. Youtube has public, unlisted and password protected videos.

In some cases it's very convenient to send an unlisted URL to a distribution list without the recipients having to enter a password. Nobody can access it without that exact URL. You don't want it totally public, but it's not highly confidential. Unlisted videos are good for this.

Unfortunately Vimeo does not support unlisted videos except for Vimeo Pro, and the feature is undocumented even there.

I agree Vimeo is very nice and imparts a more polished presentation than you can get on Youtube. The quality is good, and streaming is consistently fast.

Actually Vimeo Plus lets you do "hidden" videos as well. You choose "hide from Vimeo" in Privacy settings. It's great for uploading lectures you need students to watch but don't want the general public to know exists. Vimeo also has less restrictions on what it automatically flags as "copywrited" (but still does, especially if things are listed as Public)

And optical media'so death is greatly exaggerated. While tech savvy folk have bypassed it, dvds in particular are demanded as archives or final product (sadly Blurays haven't caught on so there's still a major loss of quality). I'm still making a half dozen a month for clients (and even when I throw in a HD digital file, always have to explain what it is and why it won't play on their DVD player)

treehorn said:

Actually Vimeo Plus lets you do "hidden" videos as well. You choose "hide from Vimeo" in Privacy settings. It's great for uploading lectures you need students to watch but don't want the general public to know exists.

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Thanks very much for that update. The lack of Youtube-style unlisted videos had been a contentious issue for Vimeo Plus users a long time. It is good to see they added this feature; I don't know when they did. I think at one time you could do this but it required viewers to register a Vimeo account; that is no longer required so it appears to be unlisted like Youtube has.

treehorn said:

...And optical media'so death is greatly exaggerated. While tech savvy folk have bypassed it, dvds in particular are demanded as archives or final product (sadly Blurays haven't caught on so there's still a major loss of quality). I'm still making a half dozen a month for clients (and even when I throw in a HD digital file, always have to explain what it is and why it won't play on their DVD player)

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We have to do what clients want but oftentimes they request a DVD because they haven't been informed of the alternatives. Also since virtually all production has shifted to HD, DVD is throwing away 5/6ths of the pixels.

Unfortunately there is no exact streaming equivalent to DVD which combines wide availability, menus and splash screen, and well-understood production & mastering. However with that comes a big hassle, especially considering the added difficulty of label printing, case printing, proofing, issues with aspect ratio, interlacing, risk of unnoticed problems being mass produced, inability to tweak after production run is committed, etc.

The hardest user segment are those who want to watch it in a family-room TV environment. Despite AppleTV, Chromecast, Roku, smart TVs, etc, penetration of streaming IP video to TVs still has a way to go.

Yet another problem is fragmentation of distribution channels for streaming video, plus inaccessibility to small (or even medium-sized) video producers. I think only Roku has no-cost private channels available to small content producers. Of course AppleTV clients can stream any video URL via AirPlay, but it's an additional step lots of people don't understand.

However most newer smart TVs have a USB slot where you can plug in a thumb drive. USB sticks in bulk quantity are cheaper than a DVD, case and duplication costs. You can have the USB stick decoratively printed, although this obviously doesn't equal the presentation quality of a DVD.

mikewithamac said:

...have an additional back-up of my videos in case (when) my external drive crashes...

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In general your most practical backup will be to a local hard drive. HD content is just too big to upload to the cloud except for small pieces. Also many ISPs have a monthly data cap which limits this further.

Hard drives are very inexpensive and quite fast relative to most networks. The HGST Touro S is a 1TB 7200 rpm bus-powered USB 3 drive. It's very fast for that type: http://www.amazon.com/HGST-High-Per...8&qid=1423054830&sr=8-1&keywords=hgst+touro+s

The 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is also pretty quick for that type: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backu...54742&sr=8-2&keywords=seagate+backup+plus+mac

Of course there are faster externally-powered drives, and those are good for production work. But the new generation of bus-powered USB 3 drives are fairly fast, much smaller and very convenient for backup. The above 2TB Seagate is so thin you could probably fit 50 of them in a desk drawer.

Spend the time editing out the real rubbish, are you ever going to sit and watch every frame you shot a year from now?

You shoot and then what? Waste most of a 2TB hard drive for what? No good reason, the worst you could do is use imovie, do a rough edit of clips, upload to vimeo, youtube, or buy a small thumb drive, once you have edited out the crap, you will have a video that will fit on a $10 8GB thumb drive from wallymart...

Pay yourself the time, not waste on archiving crap footage...

JustinePaula said:

Spend the time editing out the real rubbish, are you ever going to sit and watch every frame you shot a year from now?

You shoot and then what? Waste most of a 2TB hard drive for what? No good reason...once you have edited out the crap, you will have a video that will fit on a $10 8GB thumb drive from wallymart...

Pay yourself the time, not waste on archiving crap footage...

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Although the thread title says "Home Movies" this entails a wide range of activities. It could be birth of a new child, once-in-a-lifetime anniversaries, family reunions with elderly grandparents that will never happen again, etc.

While you describe everything shot of such events as "crap" if it's not in the final edit, there are many times you want to go back and review that material for new purposes. The cost of archiving the raw material is very low relative to the possible future value. A 2TB drive is about $80. It may cost more gas to drive to/from the family event you are shooting, so why not save it. In the future newer software and better editing skills may enable you to extract more from that material.