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pre-purchase questions about Toast 10 and AVCHD


khyron

Question

Greetings all! I currently own Toast 9 (with the HD plug-in) and am considering upgrading. Before doing so, I'd like to find out which of my issues with Toast 9 that Toast 10 may or may not improve upon. I sincerely appreciate any concrete answers folks can provide to the following questions.

 

My primary use case for Toast on my Mac is to burn DVD-R discs of my raw AVCHD camcorder content to play back in my PS3 and use as cheap, easily duplicated archival media for my footage (which serves as a "reel" or a "tape" in my Finall Cut editing workflow, essentially). Currently, using Toast 9, I am generally satisfied with the utility of this functionality, but some things could be improved.

 

First, the menus look awful. They appear to have been created with 4:3 in mind and looked jagged and stretched out in 16:9, and the same thinking seems to apply to the thumbnails for clips. For example, my 16:9 clips result in 16:9 thumbnails inside 4:3 cutouts in the theme, and end up having transparent "letterbox" spaces above and below them which look weird. Is this all the same in Toast 10, or is it improved?

 

Second, using Toast 9 to burn my DVD-R discs, I have noticed that when played back in my PS3 the clips must each be chosen from the menu. While watching a clip, it is not possible to hit "next" on my remote and flip to the next clip. This is a really undesirable usability limitation, especially when dealing with lots of short clips. Has this been improved in Toast 10?

 

Third, I am very interested in the new "AVCHD Archive" feature in Toast 10 which sounds like it would save me lots of time, especially how it can divide up a large SD card full of footage into multiple DVD-R discs automatically! This is the most interesting feature of Toast 10 for me...but there is one catch. In order for this feature to be workable for me, I need to be able to specify a unique name for each disc (to facilitate later use as editing storage). Does Toast 10 offer this as an option? If all discs burned this way have to be named "AVCHD" or something else generic, it won't be useful to me.

 

Finally, as an owner of the previous version of Toast, I understand that I am eligible for an "upgrade" price on Toast 10. However I'm not sure about the HD plug-in, is there upgrade pricing available for that, or would I have to pay the full $20? I'm interested in knowing this because Toast 10 Pro would be overly featured for my most common use cases.

 

Thanks very much to anyone who takes the time to answer these questions! :)

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I can't answer most of your questions because I don't yet have an AVCHD camcorder. However, I know the 16:9 menus are much improved in Toast 10 and the thumbnail buttons are now 16:9. I doubt the disc navigation is any different from Toast 9. I haven't seen any special price on the Blu-ray plugin for previous users. If you are on Roxio's email promo list they have had some sweet offers on Toast 10 Pro that may be just too good to pass on given that you want the plugin.

 

On the down side. there were problems with the Blu-Ray menus until Toast 10.0.4. You can read about this in other threads. Toast 10.0.5 also needs work in several areas which I hope will be settled in another update in the not too-distant future. Snow Leopard created many issues.

 

I do recommend the upgrade to Toast 10 although Roxio is still sorting some things out.

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Well, I can tell you that the AVCHD and Bluray are not working for me in snow leopard. This is on a very fast intel macbook pro (about 4 months old). I upgraded from Toast 9 to Toast 10 Titanium just for the bluray and the same AVCHD reasons you mentioned. I have a Canon Hf S100 and wanted to burn AVCHD to regular dvd's to run on my PS3. So far, It has been a total waste of $$. I sent 4 messages to Roxio since Dec. 26 (I got the camcorder for xmas:))) and not a SINGLE reply. The only way I have yet to do it with OSX is iMovie '09 does just fine, import than send to iDVD and done. The issue is it is re-encoded to AIC (Apples lower res format) then on as a .mov. I know Quicktime also will re-encode but still not native AVCHD. I did have some luck with Linux and ffmpeg and a couple other programs but that was a pain as there is no workflow and yuou have to keep opening new programs to do every next step. Sorry for the extra info, I'll just sum it up as there are a lot of bugs with Toast 10 and Snow Leopard.

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