Blu-Ray Creator

[David Cunningham]

Hello All,

 

I am currently using the old and now unsupported/developed Adobe Encore from Create Cloud CS6 for Blu-Ray creation for wedding films.

 

I am looking to replace this. I need the best solution for a MAC that also includes a good variety of menus and art.

 

I am canceling my CC subscription and just going with Final Cut Pro X for my editing, but need a Blu-Ray creation solution.

 

Thanks for your time!

 

Dave

[David Cunningham]

Bump

[Landon D. Parks]

Bluray's are vastly different from DVD's in terms of production.

 

Sony's DVD Architect Pro ($99 student, $199 regular) will give you a Bluray, but it will not give you a certified Bluray. You can use these to 'burn' a Bluray disc on your own or through someplace like Discmakers. However, 'burnt' Bluray's rarely play well on all players - older ones even more so.

 

In order to make 'pressed' or replicated Blurays that are certified with the proper copy protection, one must pay not only for replication - but also a license from the company that owns the Bluray patent (forgot who they are - look them up), which is very costly.

 

This is why you don't see too many small filmmakers selling Bluray's of their movies... And if they do, I'd caution them against it - as there have been major issues with players playing burnt Blurays.

Edited March 30, 2016 by Landon D. Parks

[Perry Paolantonio]

Hi David,

 

Short answer is - there are none. There was never proper support for Blu-ray on the mac, Adobe Encore was as close as it got, and that's a very limited authoring system that does a lot of stuff wrong.

 

Professionally, there's Scenarist, and Sony Blu-print (both Windows applications). Both will set you back a lot. I'm not sure what the HD version of Scenarist is going for these days, but it was around $10k last I checked a few years ago. I heard they're asking well north of $50k for the new 4k version, which is totally laughable. Sony was around $20k last I checked, but that was many years ago, so it may be cheaper now.

 

Also, using Scenarist is about as much fun as having your fingernails pulled out. It's one of the worst professional applications ever made, riddled with bugs, clunky UI conventions and gotchas that aren't well documented. I've been screwing around with a particularly hairy Blu-ray for the past 5 days, trying to work around workflow stupidities in Scenarist in order to meet the client's requirements. I don't recommend it! Blu-print is supposed to be easier to use, but I've never touched it due to the high price.

 

In order to make 'pressed' or replicated Blurays that are certified with the proper copy protection, one must pay not only for replication - but also a license from the company that owns the Bluray patent (forgot who they are - look them up), which is very costly.

 

This has not been the case for *many* years. It was true in the beginning and it took a few years for them to drop the expensive copy protection fees (coinciding with a significant rise in Blu-ray authoring, surprise surprise), but replicating BD is not much more expensive than replicating DVD was, say, 10 years ago. All licensing fees are rolled into the replication costs and they're significantly lower than they were in the beginning of the format.

[David Cunningham]

All this I'm sure is true. But, I'm not trying to copy protect these discs. It's just weddings and they are welcome to copy them if they want.

 

There must be an open source system out there somewhere. The problem is that I like the menu themes so I don't have to design my own menus and backgrounds. rounds.

[Perry Paolantonio]

In Blu-ray *not* having copy protection is the outlier case. In Scenarist, for example, it wasn't until version 4.5 or something of the BD authoring system that you could make a non-copy-protected disc image for burning without having to Compile, then edit an XML file by hand, then make an image you could burn. It's like non-protected discs are an afterthought.

 

The consumer tools out there can do it, but they use a DVD-like model for the menus, to avoid the insane complexities of the standard Blu-ray menu style, where you have the menus in a layer floating on top of video. What most tools (like Encore) do, is create a flattened movie, and that's inherently limiting.

 

So the problem is that the structure of a Blu-ray disc is an order of magnitude more complex than that of a DVD, and that means it's a ton of work to make a functional authoring system. So most do the bare minimum that's required to get video on a disc that will play in a BD player.

 

I have no experience with it personally, but some people use MultiAVCHD for basic authoring. There's a decent list of tools here: http://www.videohelp.com/software/sections/authoring-bd-hd-dvd

 

You'll find there's really nothing on Mac, though.