5 replies to this topic

[LinuxElf]

I always create a Blu-Ray disc image before burning to minimize the number of expensive coasters I create.

BUT... Toast allows me to create a disc image that is up to 720MB large than I can burn onto a Blu-Ray DVD.

Why does Toast allow this?

It took about 4 hours to create a disc image last night -- with 12 cores and 16GB RAM! -- on top of the hour per basketball game to create the HDs for Toast.

When I create the disc image, Toast indicates I have 597MB of available space on the Blu-Ray disc.

When I attempt to burn the image, Toast tells me I am short 120MB of space on the disc.

What gives?

[tsantee]

Don't know. Did you use a preset quality setting or did you manually set the bit rate in the custom encoder settings window?

[LinuxElf]

tsantee, on 05 February 2012 - 07:52 AM, said:

Don't know. Did you use a preset quality setting or did you manually set the bit rate in the custom encoder settings window?

I have made no changes, so obviously took some defaults. But what defaults, I do not know.

Based on my current experimenting with re-ripping my HD game videos, I can get 2:11 of video on a Blu-Ray disc.

So, I can manage by just keeping my two games to 2:11 or less.

At the moment, I am re-encoding game film totaling 2:10:45 to see if it will fit. Once it has, I be happy to check to see what defaults I am using, if you can tell me what I need to look for.

I pretty much use it out of the box.

[tsantee]

LinuxElf, on 05 February 2012 - 11:59 AM, said:

I have made no changes, so obviously took some defaults. But what defaults, I do not know.

Based on my current experimenting with re-ripping my HD game videos, I can get 2:11 of video on a Blu-Ray disc.

So, I can manage by just keeping my two games to 2:11 or less.

At the moment, I am re-encoding game film totaling 2:10:45 to see if it will fit. Once it has, I be happy to check to see what defaults I am using, if you can tell me what I need to look for.

I pretty much use it out of the box.

I don't know anything about ripping Blu-ray discs (and we can't discuss ripping copy-encrypted discs in this forum). But when you first open Toast and select BD-R as the media at the bottom of the window, Toast should report there is 23.31 GB of space available on the disc. Is that what you're seeing?

I just saw in Toast's "Assistant" window that Toast says that up to 2 hours of HD video can be burned to a Blu-ray disc.

Edited by tsantee, 06 February 2012 - 08:10 AM.

[LinuxElf]

tsantee, on 06 February 2012 - 07:47 AM, said:

I don't know anything about ripping Blu-ray discs (and we can't discuss ripping copy-encrypted discs in this forum). But when you first open Toast and select BD-R as the media at the bottom of the window, Toast should report there is 23.31 GB of space available on the disc. Is that what you're seeing?

I just saw in Toast's "Assistant" window that Toast says that up to 2 hours of HD video can be burned to a Blu-ray disc.

No worries about copying discs. This is only video of high school basketball games that I have shot myself.

23.31GB is indeed what is at the bottom of the Toast screen. (It's worth noting that the basketball_2012-02-02.toast file that I just successfully burned to a Blu-Ray disc shows in Finder as 24.97GB.)

So, here are details:

"Image File" in Toast: Lists 23.25GB available on 1 disc.
"Blu-Ray Video" in Toast: Lists 23.55GB available on 1 disc.
So, there alone is a different of 300MB.

When I add my two HD high school basketball games to the "Blu-Ray Video" in Toast, it says I have used 22.55GB on disc, with 774.2MB remaining. I then save this as a disc image.
When I open that disc image to burn it to a Blu-Ray disc, I only have 55.8MB remaining on disc.

So, Toast "Video" has 300MB more space that Toast "Image", but then what accounts for the remaining 418.4MB difference?

Now I know to make sure I have no more than 2 hours 11 minutes of video, but I am still curious as to why Toast has differences in its own formats listed, and then mysteriously an additional 400+ MB difference.

Can anyone explain?

Please let me know any additional details that would be helpful. As previously indicated, I have changed no settings from defaults.
Thanks!

[tsantee]

LinuxElf, on 06 February 2012 - 08:47 AM, said:

No worries about copying discs. This is only video of high school basketball games that I have shot myself.

23.31GB is indeed what is at the bottom of the Toast screen. (It's worth noting that the basketball_2012-02-02.toast file that I just successfully burned to a Blu-Ray disc shows in Finder as 24.97GB.)

So, here are details:

"Image File" in Toast: Lists 23.25GB available on 1 disc.
"Blu-Ray Video" in Toast: Lists 23.55GB available on 1 disc.
So, there alone is a different of 300MB.

When I add my two HD high school basketball games to the "Blu-Ray Video" in Toast, it says I have used 22.55GB on disc, with 774.2MB remaining. I then save this as a disc image.
When I open that disc image to burn it to a Blu-Ray disc, I only have 55.8MB remaining on disc.

So, Toast "Video" has 300MB more space that Toast "Image", but then what accounts for the remaining 418.4MB difference?

Now I know to make sure I have no more than 2 hours 11 minutes of video, but I am still curious as to why Toast has differences in its own formats listed, and then mysteriously an additional 400+ MB difference.

Can anyone explain?

Please let me know any additional details that would be helpful. As previously indicated, I have changed no settings from defaults.
Thanks!

Those are interesting findings. Before Toast actually encodes the video it can only guess how much space the video will require. That's because the encoder uses variable-bitrate encoding. What this means is a video of the sun slowly setting over the ocean can be compressed more than a video of a basketball game. When there is less motion the encoder can refer to earlier frames for the image rather than having to create a new pixel image. So action videos take up more space per minute of video than do videos with little motion. I suspect Toast is programmed to estimate size based on some typical average bit rate and yours is more than average.

There is a custom encoder settings window in Toast where you can adjust the encoding settings. Click the More button at the lower left of the Toast window and then click Encoding and Custom in the window that appears. Here you'll see that you can choose either MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 for the encoding. MPEG 4 has a smaller file size with no loss in quality but takes longer to encode. Also, if your HD video is already in MPEG 2 format you can choose Never Re-encode and Toast might skip the encoding process entirely. Regardless of the format you'll see that there are sliders for average and maximum bit rates. The defaults are fine but if you lower them you can get more video on a disc. If you raise them you'll get less video. You could lower just the maximum rate and leave the average the same. There also is a slider for Motion Estimation. You'll want this to be high for a basketball video. You also may want to turn on Half-Pel because that further improves clarity with videos having lots of motion. If maximum audio quality isn't important you can lower the audio bit rate to 128 kbps to reduce the space taken for the audio stream. I suspect the audio in a gym will sound just fine at 128 kbps.

The problem with all this is you're still having to guess how much actually fits a disc. I suggest downloading Bitrate Caculator and use it to make a good estimate of the settings to use for the length of your video.

There are details about how much space Toast needs for formatting, menus and various Blu-ray files that I don't know much about. Hopefully this helps you with what is not very precise.