MCE Blu Ray Drive

[scottydawg]

I purchased a Sony SR12 HiDef camcorder this week and as I started thinking about editing my footage I realized I will need to burn it to something.
Has anyone tried a MCE Blu Ray drive or any other one for a Mac Pro?
I have a Early 2008 with two Super Drives so I will have to pull one out and replace it. Any advice will be appreciated!

 

[UltraNEO*]

Regardless of drives you'll choose to install, the current state of MacOSX doesn't support Blu-Ray Burning or Movie playback. You'll have to invest in a couple of third-party application.

If you want to edit movies and publish them on to Blu-Ray you'll need Final Cut Pro to prepare the files and Adobe Encore CS3 (which ONLY comes with Premiere)... Then Toast 9 Titanium to actually burn the files.

 

[scottydawg]

Thanks for the answer, I do have Toast and Final Cut Express. Excuse my ignorance but will I need Encore to set up the DVD for burning to Toast? I can get Premiere Pro at a very reasonable price from my local college, would it be better to edit with Premiere and send to Encore for setting up the Blu Ray for burning?

 

[UltraNEO*]

Thanks for the answer, I do have Toast and Final Cut Express. Excuse my ignorance but will I need Encore to set up the DVD for burning to Toast? I can get Premiere Pro at a very reasonable price from my local college, would it be better to edit with Premiere and send to Encore for setting up the Blu Ray for burning?

I don't believe FCE has the necessary codecs to encode for blu-ray. I'm assuming you wanna playback on standalone boxes. You'll have to research in to Premiere. CS4 is coming... Might be better to wait?

 

[Cave Man]

Regardless of drives you'll choose to install, the current state of MacOSX doesn't support Blu-Ray Burning or Movie playback. You'll have to invest in a couple of third-party application.

Or if OP is authoring his own unencrypted discs, he can use Plex, which is free.

I don't believe FCE has the necessary codecs to encode for blu-ray.

Correct - FCE cannot encode to m2ts containers, which are needed for Blu-Ray playback, unless the Blu-Ray drive supports other containers.

 

[scottydawg]

I will be waiting for CS4 (somewhat patiently), it looks like it will have some nice improvments based on the videos I have seen on the Adobe website (could just be hype) and I use Photoshop so it will be my path to upgrade.

Cave Man I never had heard Plex and it took a couple of searchs on Google to find but now that I have found it I am going to check it out. For others you can see it here: http://www.plexapp.com/

I sure find it interesting that Apple Final Cut Express (and FCP) support AVCHD but there is no path to output your videos in HD.

 

[scottydawg]

After doing some reading I did learn something tonight. I can edit HD footage in FCE and output up to 30 minutes of HD video on a standard DVD using Toast with the $20 Blu Ray/HD plug in. If you have a Blu Ray player like the PS3 it will play in full HD!

 

[UltraNEO*]

After doing some reading I did learn something tonight. I can edit HD footage in FCE and output up to 30 minutes of HD video on a standard DVD using Toast with the $20 Blu Ray/HD plug in. If you have a Blu Ray player like the PS3 it will play in full HD!

For short clips maybe it'll be fine but you'll be limited to about 4Gb of movie footages/sound/media. Your PS3 isn't reading the disc as a actual BR by the way... It's just reading the HD data and playing it. The whole idea of BD-R is to store huge amounts of raw, uncompressed data on a single disc, approximately 25/50/100Gb (depending on the disc) in a continuous stream.