Will Toast encode surround audio tracks?

[WayneH]

Question: If I use Quicktime add sound tracks to an exported iMovie, what will Toast do with those added channels? I don't want to wait through the whole encode and burn process just to find out that Toast mixes back down to stereo. Does anyone have experience with this?

 

I have an HD iMovie project that I'm burning to DVD with Toast 10. It took a long while, but I've finally got a working process; I export from iMovie as AIC video with Big Endian audio. This gets encoded using Toast version 10.0.2. (I get the dreaded -18771 error with later versions.)

 

Now I'd like to use Quicktime to add a stereo audio (music) track to the surround channels. This is easy in QT: Just open the movie exported from iMovie, and then the sound file, copy all of the music, place the playhead in the movie where you want the song to start, and choose "add to movie". Then in movie properties, you can direct where you want the two new channels of the added sound track to go. The default will be left and right fronts, but you can choose left and right surrounds or even L & R rear surrounds.

 

Will this work?

[tsantee]

That doesn't work for me, when making a "blu-ray video on DVD". If I drag a movie in, in either AIC or m2v format, and then the .ac3 file to go with it, Toast doesn't put them together. It treats the soundtrack as a "playlist". Maybe I could put the video and sound back together with Quicktime?

 

My general question is: What's the best workflow to end up with HD video on a DVD for playback on a blu-ray player?

 

So far I've been able to export from iMovie as AIC plus Big Endian audio, and Toast 10.0.2 successfully made a playable disk out of this. The encoding took about 1 hour for each minute of movie, but it did work. An earlier attempt exporting H.264 with AAC audio from iMovie gave me a big (7 second!) audio sync gap on the burnt disk.

 

I'd like to take the AIC file from iMovie (which I think is the best I can get out of iMovie) and use Compressor to encode the video for Toast. But to what? I've already succeeded in using FCP and Compressor to make a surround soundtrack that works nicely. I just need to figure out how to get it back with the video track in a way that makes Toast happy.

I have no experience creating Blu-ray discs. What I know about how Toast does video DVDs may or may not be of help here. If you add a .m2v file to Toast's Video window (with DVD selected as the format) and there is no corresponding audio file, Toast opens a dialogue box asking you to locate the audio file. That box doesn't appear if Toast automatically finds the audio stream. This happens when the audio stream has the same name (except for the extension) and location as the video file. You cannot drag the .m2v and .ac3 files separately to Toast. So when you added the .m2v file for your Blu-ray project, does Toast describe the file in its window as having any audio?

[WayneH]

So when you added the .m2v file for your Blu-ray project, does Toast describe the file in its window as having any audio?

Oops, you're absolutely right. It put the two files together without a peep (I had the right file naming) and I didn't even realize it. Cool.

 

I need to experiment today to see if I can get this to work without encoding within Toast, so that I might get ac3 coming through without losing channels. Yesterday I tried AIC video plus AC3 surround track (put together into one file with QT) and this failed. It produced a disk with only 2 channel Dolby Digital. Perhaps there are Toast settings that would have given me all 5.1. That's what I'll shoot for today.

[WayneH]

Oops, you're absolutely right. It put the two files together without a peep (I had the right file naming) and I didn't even realize it. Cool.

 

I need to experiment today to see if I can get this to work without encoding within Toast, so that I might get ac3 coming through without losing channels. Yesterday I tried AIC video plus AC3 surround track (put together into one file with QT) and this failed. It produced a disk with only 2 channel Dolby Digital. Perhaps there are Toast settings that would have given me all 5.1. That's what I'll shoot for today.

Nuts! Toast won't put the audio in with the video when the video is anything other than m2v. I tried .avc and .mp4 with no luck. Trying m2v now.

[tsantee]

When Toast encodes the video and audio for DVD or Blu-ray it can only create a two-channel audio track.

[WayneH]

When Toast encodes the video and audio for DVD or Blu-ray it can only create a two-channel audio track.

Thanks for the definitive answer.

 

I've also learned that I cannot actually play the multiple channels back properly to my receiver from QT. To play multiple channels out over S/PDIF, they must first be encoded into, eg., AC-3 and passed to the AVR as two channels, which the AVR then decodes. The optical port on my G5 Mac (and any S/PDIF port?) cannot handle more than two unencoded channels. So QT plays the multiple channels in my movie but mixes them into the two channels for output via S/PDIF. You can still alter how that mix occurs within QT: If you specify rear surrounds, the channels get dropped, if you specify center, the channels will be sent there.

 

The DVD Player or VLC Player sends AC-3 from a DVD to your optical port in a passthrough without decoding it first as QT does. QT won't normally play in passthrough mode.

 

So perhaps if I mixed my audio into a multichannel AC-3 file, which holds multiple channels within two streams, maybe Toast would lay this onto the disk properly, ultimately allowing multichannel playback? What sort of soundtrack DOES Toast put on a disk using the HD-on-DVD process?

[tsantee]

Thanks for the definitive answer.

 

I've also learned that I cannot actually play the multiple channels back properly to my receiver from QT. To play multiple channels out over S/PDIF, they must first be encoded into, eg., AC-3 and passed to the AVR as two channels, which the AVR then decodes. The optical port on my G5 Mac (and any S/PDIF port?) cannot handle more than two unencoded channels. So QT plays the multiple channels in my movie but mixes them into the two channels for output via S/PDIF. You can still alter how that mix occurs within QT: If you specify rear surrounds, the channels get dropped, if you specify center, the channels will be sent there.

 

The DVD Player or VLC Player sends AC-3 from a DVD to your optical port in a passthrough without decoding it first as QT does. QT won't normally play in passthrough mode.

 

So perhaps if I mixed my audio into a multichannel AC-3 file, which holds multiple channels within two streams, maybe Toast would lay this onto the disk properly, ultimately allowing multichannel playback? What sort of soundtrack DOES Toast put on a disk using the HD-on-DVD process?

Toast can use an existing AC-3 audio file without re-encoding it. I'm not sure how to do that when the video isn't already in MPEG 2 format. My process is to drag in a .m2v video file and Toast either automatically adds the corresponding AC-3 audio file or asks me to locate it. I also can option-drag an AC-3 audio file into the Toast Audio window.

 

You may need to have Toast encode the video with the two-channel audio. This will be written as separate .m2v and .ac3 files in the Roxio Converted Items folder. Trash that .ac3 file and add the .m2v to Toast and then have Toast ask you for your multi-channel .ac3 file. The result will be multiplexed into a video DVD.

[WayneH]

My process is to drag in a .m2v video file and Toast either automatically adds the corresponding AC-3 audio file or asks me to locate it. I also can option-drag an AC-3 audio file into the Toast Audio window.

That doesn't work for me, when making a "blu-ray video on DVD". If I drag a movie in, in either AIC or m2v format, and then the .ac3 file to go with it, Toast doesn't put them together. It treats the soundtrack as a "playlist". Maybe I could put the video and sound back together with Quicktime?

 

My general question is: What's the best workflow to end up with HD video on a DVD for playback on a blu-ray player?

 

So far I've been able to export from iMovie as AIC plus Big Endian audio, and Toast 10.0.2 successfully made a playable disk out of this. The encoding took about 1 hour for each minute of movie, but it did work. An earlier attempt exporting H.264 with AAC audio from iMovie gave me a big (7 second!) audio sync gap on the burnt disk.

 

I'd like to take the AIC file from iMovie (which I think is the best I can get out of iMovie) and use Compressor to encode the video for Toast. But to what? I've already succeeded in using FCP and Compressor to make a surround soundtrack that works nicely. I just need to figure out how to get it back with the video track in a way that makes Toast happy.