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How is the lack of Blu Ray affecting your views.

Denarius

Denarius

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 5, 2008
690
0
Gironde, France
I've just installed Final Cut Studio 3 on the Mac Pro and it's great that it can now at least burn the FCP timeline to Blu Ray for proofing, but Blu-Ray has steadily been creeping up in popularity, Adobe Encore has provided Blu Ray authoring for a fair time, albeit in a limited capacity yet Apple seem to have barely got off the starting grid.

As a stalwart Mac fanboy I'm nevertheless starting to recognise that the PC is starting to offer a more comprehensive package, not only for optical media options. but also it seems to have an edge on Codecs as well (AVCHD anybody?)

Please don't think I'm trolling here. I'm just interested to hear what people are thinking.
 
I'm planning on getting a Mac Pro at work for video editing. Currently using a Dell Precision T5400, running Adobe CS4.

The lack of Blu-Ray is the only reason the Mac isn't under my desk already.
 
If you need to author Blu-Ray discs for your clients buy the right gear to author Blu-Ray discs. These are all just tools and it's the usefulness of the tool, not the brand, that matters.


Lethal
 
Hey Lethal, what do you hardware or tools do you recommend for burning to blu-ray from fcp?
 
You can use Roxio's Toast 10 with the BluRay plugin...more info here
http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/plugin/overview.html (for simple playback authoring and titling)

You can also purchase Adobe CS3 Premier and use Encore. If you have more money, CS4 obviously supports it too.

Here is a great article to get you going (Using FCP and CS3 Encore). If you don't have Premier yet, check Craigslist locally and buy from someone you can meet and trust (I'm sure this goes without saying)...get the CD's and the literature with Key.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/blu-ray_fcp_fields.html

Yes, they are a bit more detailed than just having support built in from Apple, for FCP...but as Jobs mentioned the other day, BluRay is a world of frustration right now and Apple won't jump on board until sales really start to take off.

I'm really curious if it will...with the cheap state of SolidState these days, how long will we be using the 5" discs in mechanical transports...VS. using a Flash or Mem card for the same (or greater capacity).

If you're just dabbling, Toast is a $100 solution to give it a go!

Good Luck

J
 
dcac,

I don't know what your needs are but there is also NetBlender's DoStudio. It's more expensive but it's also supposed to be better than Adobe's offerings from what I've heard.


W/regards to Jobs and Blu-ray he is just trying to protect the iTunes store, IMO. Apple is now deep in the media distribution businesses and Blu-ray is a competing format. If companies like Dell, Sony, Adobe and Roxio can figure out how to handle the 'bag of hurt' I don't see why Apple is so flummoxed by it.


Lethal
 
LethalWolfe said:
W/regards to Jobs and Blu-ray he is just trying to protect the iTunes store, IMO. Apple is now deep in the media distribution businesses and Blu-ray is a competing format. If companies like Dell, Sony, Adobe and Roxio can figure out how to handle the 'bag of hurt' I don't see why Apple is so flummoxed by it.
Lethal
Click to expand...

That's a plausible theory, perhaps strategically sound but tactically misguided in my view. The time hasn't arrived where we can download tens of gigabytes at our whim. The limiting factor is the ISPs (although I'm only speaking for the UK situation here). Fair usage policies seem to incur penalties above 10GB per month so a film at Blu Ray quality would be out of the question.

One thing that piqued my interest is that we bought Harry Potter 6 on Blu Ray the other week (was disappointed by the film incidentally) and it included a voucher to download an iTunes or Windows Media version from www.wbdigitalcopy.com for free. It fits with them believing that Apple are doing this to attempt to marginalise BD (Apple are dramatically overestimating their own influence if that is the case) and using this avenue.

There's no doubt Apple has profited massively by essentially bundling a well designed propietary player range with a media distribution network, but as the importance of digital downloads to media distribution increases I think Apple will be in the position of effectively having a Monopoly, which can only be a bad thing.
 
LethalWolfe said:
W/regards to Jobs and Blu-ray he is just trying to protect the iTunes store, IMO. Apple is now deep in the media distribution businesses and Blu-ray is a competing format. If companies like Dell, Sony, Adobe and Roxio can figure out how to handle the 'bag of hurt' I don't see why Apple is so flummoxed by it.
Click to expand...

This is part of it -- though I'd like to restate it in a less malicious fashion: given the Apple belief that new physical distribution delivery vectors are anachronistic at birth, it doesn't make much sense to adopt them until the market demands it.

Shame though -- I like BluRay, and wouldn't mind a beefier format for backups. If Apple announced 17" MBPs with BluRay and big SandForce-based SSDs tomorrow, I'd buy one. As it stands, I can wait until next year to upgrade.
 
Moving parts are soooo last decade. :D Personally, I think the future lies with downloadable/streamed content and solid state drives. Thus no blu-ray, no worries.
 
SuperBrown said:
Moving parts are soooo last decade. :D Personally, I think the future lies with downloadable/streamed content and solid state drives. Thus no blu-ray, no worries.
Click to expand...

You can't press SSD like you can optical media. That would drive up production costs quite dramatically. Downloads are already here, but the business model has yet to mature. If the ISPs decide on bandwidth costs, then that could be the death knell for some. Optical media also give you a more secure product in terms of data loss.

LethalWolfe said:
W/regards to Jobs and Blu-ray he is just trying to protect the iTunes store, IMO. Apple is now deep in the media distribution businesses and Blu-ray is a competing format. If companies like Dell, Sony, Adobe and Roxio can figure out how to handle the 'bag of hurt' I don't see why Apple is so flummoxed by it.
Click to expand...

While I don't doubt the iTS is involved, there is also the terms of Blu-ray Disc playback, which requires code in the OS kernel and is highly invasive. I understand Apple's reluctance, especially since Blu-ray encryption has already been defeated.
 
dasmb said:
Shame though -- I like BluRay, and wouldn't mind a beefier format for backups. If Apple announced 17" MBPs with BluRay and big SandForce-based SSDs tomorrow, I'd buy one. As it stands, I can wait until next year to upgrade.
Click to expand...

I used DVD for backups for a while but in the end it is much quicker to use an external drive. Burning discs is a chore. Blu-ray is an improvement for movies due to the increased resolution but the increase in capacity isn't all that great - 25 GB just doesn't cut it when I have a 320GB drive in my laptop not to mention the cost of the blank discs.

For the record I have both Blu-ray and HD DVD players at home as well as an Apple TV. I have no interest in playing the Blu-ray resolution files on my laptop so it is great that many Blu-rays come with either the DVD version which can be ripped or a download voucher for an iTunes compatible version and these play perfectly well on my MacBook Pro. If I had a Blu-ray drive in my laptop I may use it but only as a curiosity as I rarely play a DVD since I have the movies I like in MP4 format and can just grab a bunch of I'm travelling. I couldn't care less if my laptop didn't even come with an optical drive.
 
No missing it at all. Out of all the customers I had, only one asked me about BluRay and even then didn't get the whole HD picture. (Wedding videos)

I personally would like it.
 
don't really need.if i want to see a movie in bluray i download it if i have the original dvd. as for personal videos i store them in my computer and stream them via HDMI
 
I'd really like Blu-ray burning capabilities personally. I can record HD material with my EyeTV and it would be great to be able to transfer some of these football games to optical media (for personal use, of course, which as far as I understand is completely legal), keep them full resolution, and free up some hard drive space.
 
I think I've pretty much gotten over the fact that Apple is in no particular hurry to adopt Blu-ray. When I want to watch a BD movie, I just boot into Windows. My only remaining gripe with the virtual absence of BD on the Mac platform is the scarcity of REAL authoring software and the fact that the only way to get Encore from Adobe is to buy Premiere, which I wouldn't use anyway. So Adobe, if Apple isn't showing DVDSP any BD love, why not offer Encore as a standalone product for $200-300? You'd sell a lot of copies, I would think...

I used DVD for backups for a while but in the end it is much quicker to use an external drive. Burning discs is a chore. Blu-ray is an improvement for movies due to the increased resolution but the increase in capacity isn't all that great - 25 GB just doesn't cut it when I have a 320GB drive in my laptop not to mention the cost of the blank discs.
Click to expand...

Well, that's one way to look at it. But optical discs are far more reliable in terms of data integrity than mechanical hard drives ever will be. For some of us, that's important. I use both hard drives and optical discs for backup purposes, but all of my critical data eventually makes its way to optical discs for archival. Archival is about the only thing my BD-R drive does in Mac OS. Kind of sad, really. :p
 
As far as production goes... I would like to be able to burn my hi-def film I made last semester to a blu-ray disc.

But really, it doesn't effect me, besides to make my decision not to buy another overpriced Apple laptop easier.
 
Jadedmonkey,

Try and get your school to order a blu-ray drive. Drexel's film department got one a few months ago, as long as they have CS4 and Encore, you're good to go.
 
dukebound85 said:
It will be a large factor when I go buy my next computer

If Apple doesn't shape up, they will lose me as a customer
Click to expand...

They know that, but they don't care. Apple's main job is to sell as many devices as they can with the highest margin so they can generate the most revenue. Increasingly, the bang for the buck isn't there in the pro desktop market and that's becoming increasingly true as Intel performance gets ever more complex and more expensive, and maintains a high cycle rate.

Bottom line, Apple's bottom line come out best in the mobile lineup and consumer computers like the iMac. Some have speculated that the Mac Pro is done as of mid-2012 (hey - people never thought they'd dump their LaserWriter printer line either - but it was virtually the first thing on the block when Steve rejoined the company). As Steve said at the iPad keynote, "we're a mobile device company now". If you rely on Macs for real work, that ought to send a chill down your spine.

No doubt they've crunched the numbers and will continue to do so, but it appears that when they look at sales trends, then revenue numbers, then projected costs vs those numbers, then compare them to, say, Dell or Acer....handwriting's on the wall. Not enough margin to keep the Mac Pro's in the game.
 
For my needs right now at least, it doesn't really effect me. Currently I'm working nn the website side for content for my station. If anything we downscale it so much that recording in HD is pointless. The only nice thing about blueray is being able to do back ups and burn home movies but other then that... I don't have a real for it need yet in my line of work.

edit - i think the biggest drainer is FCP not support AVCHD. If this was allowed I would be drooling of the FS-5 (a DTE to record to native .mov) /drool
 
"If you rely on Macs for real work, that ought to send a chill down your spine."

I don't know...the front page of MR has a rumor that Apple may be getting "first dibs" on the i7 Hexacore chips for the new line of Mac Pros...as early as the end of this month. They have a pretty close knit relationship with Intel right now which tends to keep me optimistic as well (I'm a video and audio editor by trade).

I think you're right...their profit margin is in the mobile world...but their demand is also going up on the top end with more professionals than ever using Logic and FCP.

I guess I'm going to hang with the dead goon on this one;) (Cool name:))

Peace

J
 
akdj said:
"If you rely on Macs for real work, that ought to send a chill down your spine."

I don't know...the front page of MR has a rumor that Apple may be getting "first dibs" on the i7 Hexacore chips for the new line of Mac Pros...as early as the end of this month. They have a pretty close knit relationship with Intel right now which tends to keep me optimistic as well (I'm a video and audio editor by trade).

I think you're right...their profit margin is in the mobile world...but their demand is also going up on the top end with more professionals than ever using Logic and FCP.

I guess I'm going to hang with the dead goon on this one;) (Cool name:))

Peace

J
Click to expand...

I hope you're both right.
 
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