Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Final Cut Pro to Blu Ray

iJon

iJon

macrumors 604
Original poster
Feb 7, 2002
6,590
236
Let me first state that I am not familiar with Final Cut so bare with me.

I currently have a good friend of mine who has shot a movie and needed some assistance getting it on Blu Ray. I found him a compatible internal Blu Ray burner and told him we could put it in my Mac Pro when it arrives.

We ran into a few problems and while we did find a solution to resume for tomorrow I still wanted to ask some more expert people on the matter for some advice.

Currently right now I have Final Cut Pro 7 and they have 6. He brought the movie to my house from his editor but we ran into some problems with offline files and extra effect content that was installed on the editors version of Final Cut Pro on his own computer.

The suggestion they came up with was to export the movie in the highest quality h.264 Quicktime file, then bring that to my house, drop it in Final Cut and then use the built in burn to Blu Ray feature to go from there.

I don't see why that wouldn't work but in all honesty I don't know. Is there a better recommendation that someone else has on here? Any help would be much appreciated.
 
I do have Toast Titanium but I figured Final Cut Pro's built in Blu-Ray would be superior to using a 3rd party program.

Does Toast do a better job? I'm very familiar with Toast but I've never used it to burn a Blu Ray before.
 
iJon said:
I do have Toast Titanium but I figured Final Cut Pro's built in Blu-Ray would be superior to using a 3rd party program.

Does Toast do a better job? I'm very familiar with Toast but I've never used it to burn a Blu Ray before.
Click to expand...

Toast is good when you're burning a bluray with a bunch of different content from various sources. If you're burning one movie, I would just have them export as ProRes import into Final Cut on a new sequence, and use Final Cut's BluRay option in the File > Share menu. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
 
If you have the space, I would export it as uncompressed 8 or 10 bit instead of ProRes. No reason to compress it twice.:)
 
faustfire said:
If you have the space, I would export it as uncompressed 8 or 10 bit instead of ProRes. No reason to compress it twice.:)
Click to expand...
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 10-bit Uncompressed export and a ProRes 422 (which is 10-bit as well) export. Exporting Uncompressed 10-bit is just carrying around extra weight for no reason unless the entire workflow, starting w/the camera master, is Uncompressed 10-bit.

ProRes, Cineform, RED, Avid, etc., are all offering mastering-quality codecs that can retain the same image quality of Uncompressed but at a fraction of the file size. 'Compression' isn't necessarily a four letter word. ;)


Lethal
 
LethalWolfe said:
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a 10-bit Uncompressed export and a ProRes 422 (which is 10-bit as well) export.


Lethal
Click to expand...
That's exactly what I would expect with the exception of analog video captured and edited including various color adjustments, fx etc. I did quite a few capturing with my old black magic studio SD and know by own experience.
 
rhkamra said:
Toast is good when you're burning a bluray with a bunch of different content from various sources. If you're burning one movie, I would just have them export as ProRes import into Final Cut on a new sequence, and use Final Cut's BluRay option in the File > Share menu. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
Click to expand...
But in this case the TS has got a pal with FinalCut Studio 6 which - if I remember correctly - did not feature Blu-ray export. In this case it would probably be easier to use Toast, doing all the work on the very same Mac.

P.S.: you might also use an external case with SATA-FW800 adapter if your Mac doesn't feature SATA for the optical drive bay. Don't bother to try out the spare SATA socket on MacPros such as early 2008 since it won't work with optical drives (However, there are alternatives: I have in fact installed an SATA optical BD burner on my early 2008 using an SATA-parallels mini-adapter @ 16 Euro).
 
shorafix said:
But in this case the TS has got a pal with FinalCut Studio 6 which - if I remember correctly - did not feature Blu-ray export. In this case it would probably be easier to use Toast, doing all the work on the very same Mac.

P.S.: you might also use an external case with SATA-FW800 adapter if your Mac doesn't feature SATA for the optical drive bay. Don't bother to try out the spare SATA socket on MacPros such as early 2008 since it won't work with optical drives (However, there are alternatives: I have in fact installed an SATA optical BD burner on my early 2008 using an SATA-parallels mini-adapter @ 16 Euro).
Click to expand...

I am taking Lethal's advice and it should work just fine. My friends are exporting the movie via ProRes from Final Cut 6, then bringing the project to my house. Then we are importing it into my Final Cut 7, then using the built in BluRay feature from there.

Thanks for everyone's advice. I'll let you know how it goes when we are finished. They are working on an older MacBook Pro so exporting to ProRes takes them quite some time. Should be good to go tomorrow.

If I need anymore help then I will certainly ask cause this is all new territory for me.

As for my computer, I have the latest Mac Pro and the Pioneer Blu Ray drive was installed with ease and the computer recognizes it no problem. Shouldn't be any issues there.
 
No need to transcode at all

iJon said:
..They are working on an older MacBook Pro so exporting to ProRes takes them quite some time. Should be good to go tomorrow....
Click to expand...

I just thought on it once again. The best way was in fact moving the project to an external harddrive with the FinalCut Pro 6 internal "media manager" option and save the project on the external HD as well. Then just plug the external harddrive into your MacPro. Open the project with FCP7 and export it to Blu-ray. There is no need for transcoding at all.
 
Last edited:
Figured I would update you guys. Been having a lot of problems getting this down.

So I used the Share feature of FCP7 and after it took 2 hours to transcode into a h.264 and ac3 file FCP gave me an error saying my disc drive wasn't accessible and being used by another application.

Something sounded fishy but I changed a few things up and started the process over again. After another 2 hours I get the same exact error message. I did a bit of research and it appears I'm not the only one having a problem. Only conclusion I came across was it is a bug. I also found many other people on various threads on Apple's Discussion boards giving advice to not use the Share feature since it had too many issues.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12545637

So, right before I went to bed I dropped the ProRes into Toast 11 and let it burn. Woke up this morning to find Toast hung up at 99% of the writing phase. I quit Toast and the disc mounted. All the data appears to be there so I'm not convinced the disc isn't okay. Unfortunately I don't have a way to watch the movie so my friend is in the process of locating a Blu Ray player to test it out.

Currently I am reburning the disc with Toast to see if I can get 100% completion, we'll see. From what I've read my only other option would to be to use the Blu Ray feature of Compressor but if I'm not mistaken I cannot do even a simple menu with Compressor, but I might be wrong. If it all possible we need a basic menu since the Film Festival we are submitting to requested it.

It's been a bumpy ride but I'm getting there. Thanks for all the advice again guys, I'll keep you updated.
 
Last edited:
Here's a thought and one I'm considering for clients. Instead of Blu Ray players, what about H.264 files to a USB stick or hard drive? Most BR players will read H.264 files I believe.

Of course, I'm still researching whether or not the bitrate is the same. I know BR is 25 mbps or more?

I've only had 2 clients ask for BR, but the original footage was SD so the H.264 files look fantastic and the process is more convenient than burning BRs, which has unnecessary steps in imho.

Let's hope the next version of FCP makes this easier.
 
Keebler said:
Here's a thought and one I'm considering for clients. Instead of Blu Ray players, what about H.264 files to a USB stick or hard drive? Most BR players will read H.264 files I believe.

Of course, I'm still researching whether or not the bitrate is the same. I know BR is 25 mbps or more?

I've only had 2 clients ask for BR, but the original footage was SD so the H.264 files look fantastic and the process is more convenient than burning BRs, which has unnecessary steps in imho.

Let's hope the next version of FCP makes this easier.
Click to expand...

The only reason we are messing with this is because the movie must been sent to a Film Festival and they are requesting Blu Ray disc of the movie with a menu. They said they have some issues with auto play discs. Not sure why but that's all the details I have so far.

My friend found a Blu Ray player not to long ago and will be picking the disc up from here in about an hour and we'll see what results I got with Toast.

Currently have Toast burning another... Fingers crossed.
 
Another update.

So I didn't realize that VLC could play the stream from the BluRay disc created with Toast. Once I realized that I opened the file in VLC and the video played perfectly. Despite cutting off at 99% everything seemed fine.

Did some research on Roxio's site and found that many people are having a problem with BluRay hanging up at 99%. Most people said thei disc was fine and other people saying 5-10 second were cut off. Fortunately for us there was some lead out black space at the end of the disc so it didn't matter anyways.

The bug appears to be with just Toast 11. The only solution people gave was to save the disc as a disc image within Toast and then burn or use Toast 10. Some people said 11.0.1 update of Toast fixed the issue but that is what version I have so who knows.

Currently exporting as a disc image so I make more copies but it looks like this project is complete. I told my friend to still double check and put it in a Blu Ray player to make sure the menus work properly.

Glad it's done and hopefully some of my shortfalls will be fixed and help out others who need to author a BluRay disc. As much as Apple is wanting to bypass BluRay with their products I hope they at least treat BluRay authoring seriously in the next version of Final Cut Studio, simply inexcusable.
 
Did you consider using the Share menu (pointing to a hard drive) to create a .dmg file of the BluRay? From here, you could use Disk Utility to burn it, and perhaps that would get rid of the error you are having.
 
I guess there must be a reason, why you don't use Final Cut Pro Media Manager in order to transfer the whole project to your MacPro doing the final prostproduction including Blu-ray burning on FCP7. :confused:
 
rhkamra said:
Did you consider using the Share menu (pointing to a hard drive) to create a .dmg file of the BluRay? From here, you could use Disk Utility to burn it, and perhaps that would get rid of the error you are having.
Click to expand...

Actually I never thought of doing that. Even though we successfully accomplished everything with Toast I went ahead and tried this.

The disc image was created successfully and burned successfully. My friend reported back and said the disc created with Final Cut Pro was only playable on certain Blu Ray players where the one with Toast played on everything.

Doesn't make any sense, we were using good Verbatim media and burning at 2x (only speed it will burn at) so who knows.

Hopefully with a new Final Cut next week we'll see Apple readdress some of these issues.


shorafix said:
I guess there must be a reason, why you don't use Final Cut Pro Media Manager in order to transfer the whole project to your MacPro doing the final prostproduction including Blu-ray burning on FCP7. :confused:
Click to expand...

That probably would have worked but a final export to ProRes 422 was probably easier for both parties.
 
If I'm understanding correctly, I can use the Compress HD card to export my prores sequences into h.264 then drop the h.264 files directly into toast 11 and build a menu etc..? Then burn?

I can find all sorts of info on dropping files into Toast for it to convert h.264, but can't find anything on importing h.264 right into it.

The CompressHD card is fast so I'm wanting to use it exclusively.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back