No relief from -18771 error with 10.0.7

[WayneH]

My first project after the update failed overnight with the dreaded -18771 error.

 

Heavy sigh.

[PhotoJoeSweden]

It works great for me IF I'm using NTSC. When I use PAL it won't work. I went from 24fps, due to jittery picture, to 25fps and it failed. Gonna try 30fps due to the fact that my 50" full HD plasma is showing it in 1080i60 anyway.

 

This sucks Roxio!

[pruthe]

I don't know if I can elaborate any more than I have. I think I've told you pretty much everything that I do. The hard drive cameras I'm using are all Sonys: HDR-SR7, HDR-XR520V, HDR-XR150. I set up each cameras for best HD quality recording possible. Then bring into FCE with 1920x1080/60i setup.

 

I have another project that I'm running a 2nd BD on DVD encode/burn test on. Its a 35 minute project. Started up the encode about an hour ago and its about 30% done now. Will post a message here on results. I looked at Activity Monitor and Toast is running all 4 processors at about 350%. So I think it definitely helps to have some processor power when doing encode. Also, all my video files are on either internal or external SATA hard drives, so all disk access is pretty fast. I have 2 external 4 bay eSata boxes which I have my external (non-RAID) hard drives. I previously had problems using FCE when editing video files with external USB or Firewire HDs. Sometimes the video in FCE display couldn't keep up when I skimmed ahead quickly. The eSata drives solved that, but maybe the faster drives also help with Toast encode in some way.

 

Will let know how encode/burn of 2nd project goes in a couple hours.

 

pruthe

[pruthe]

...

 

Will let know how encode/burn of 2nd project goes in a couple hours.

 

pruthe

 

Everything worked correctly with encode/burn of 2nd project and played fine in blu-ray player. Videspec results similar to first test.

 

[Galen Fott]

Just wanted to chime in with a little bit of insight about this infuriating error message. I'm trying to export 1920x1080 QT Animation-compressed files from After Effects and make them playable with Blu-ray players on standard DVDs. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I did a good bit of experimentation about this a few months back, and concluded that there are some files that Toast simply doesn't "like", and it's a fairly arbitrary "decision" on Toast's part. But if it's going to give the 18771 error message on a file, it's going to give it every time, no matter how many times you try with that particular file.

 

Just now however, I received the dreaded error, and so went back into After Effects and simply added two seconds of black to the beginning and end of my file (which brings it up to just about 2 minutes running time total). And Toast just created the disc with no problems. Go figure. But it's worth making some random, non-destructive change like this to your file, and then trying again.

[WayneH]

My first project after the update failed overnight with the dreaded -18771 error.

 

Heavy sigh.

Success at last !! At least I'm done multiplexing and proceeding to burning a disk. We'll see how it works on my BD player soon.

 

As many have suggested, I retreated to 10.0.2 and encoding finished without a whimper. No -18771 error, and no re-encode at multiplexing. With identical settings that produced a failed file in 10.0.7, the older version produced a file about 6 Mb larger, out of 800Mb. Odd. I'm nearly certain that the encode with 10.0.2 was also quite a bit faster than with 10.0.7. Again, odd.

 

Since I'm preparing my disk in 10.0.7, using a file or files encoded by 10.0.2, am I missing anything? I mean, I think I'm getting the best of both versions this way, and it's no bother because I'm pausing the process anyway on purpose, so I can add the surround .ac3 in place of the sound file encoded by Toast. This might be a good approach in general - encode in 10.0.2 and prepare the disk in 10.0.7 - to avoid encoding problems, for those folks plagued by this problem.

[WayneH]

Success at last !! At least I'm done multiplexing and proceeding to burning a disk. We'll see how it works on my BD player soon.

Aaarrrrgggghhh! The image was "burned" successfully but at 4.5 Gb, it's a rat hair too big to fit on a DVD (max 4.38 Gb, according to Toast). Why the heck will it allow saving a DVD disk image that it can't burn to a real disk? That's a cruel tease.

 

Is there some trick I might use to squeak under this limbo bar? I guess I'll have to bring the bit rates down a little on one of the sections to squeeze it just a little bit more.

 

So near and yet so far.

[Tubaman]

I have given up on ROXIO! After 10 months, my 2009 vacation is still not on a dvd. I tried every suggestion given but can't burn an avchd to dvd. 24" Imac 6 months old, Mastered video with Final Cut Express 4. My solution: Moved files to PC with Pinnacle 14, got the job done in one day! Roxio ignored my requests for assistance. I have pulled ALL Roxio from my store's shelf, will not offer this product to my customers. This product makes it very hard to suggest an Apple to any one wanting to make Hi def home movies.

[ComPH]

Since I'm preparing my disk in 10.0.7, using a file or files encoded by 10.0.2, am I missing anything?

 

Do you import chapter markers from your editor? If you do, are the chapters placed properly? What is the benefit of encoding in 10.0.2 and burning in 10.0.7?

 

I could do everything with 10.0.2 that I needed except for properly placing chapters. Starting with 10.0.3, I get the -18771 error when encoding AVCHD on DVD. If I do not do AVCHD on DVD, but use BD, 10.0.7 works just fine, chapters and everything else. What is puzzling me, is why some people get good results with the 10.0.7 and I do not. It may have something to do with the OS-X update, which happened at the same time the 10.0.3 came on line.... I think I tried all the suggestions people had on this forum. Like many others, my greatest frustration is with Roxio's non-responsivness.

[WayneH]

@pruthe: I tried to duplicate your environment as close as possible, that gives you good results, after first thrashing the original settings, unfortunately I keep having the same errors and crashes. Using 10.0.7, "Best" auto-settings as well as manual, with and without audio, still the same error message after about an hour of preparing the files for the burner, the dreaded error message is back.

Can you elaborate on your source material, source, resolution, codec, and so on? I'm looking very hard at poorly rendered titles prepared by iMovie 09 at high res as the major suspect in my problems. If I delete titles and re-export from iMovie, I'll often get a success. Testing takes so long it's hard to be definitive about anything.) I suspect, as tsantee suggested, that missing or damaged frames are at the root cause of the Toast encoder choking. In my case it's titling causing the problem, but I imagine there are other ways a video file could be seen as undigestible.

 

Changing direction, what are the chances that Roxio simply bought the encoding engine and cannot really fix things that are internal to that code? I've seen this sort of thing in corporate software many times. A company pays a contractor to develop a solution. The developer meets the specs, gets paid and moves on. Any problems that later appear in the software are just tough nookies. You either have to live with it or try to re-hire the developer to come back and fix it.

[IanW555]

I am also having this issue on my iMac 2Core 3.06ghz 4gb RAM running OSX 10.6.4. Funny thing though, I exported two projects from FCE 4.01 to Quicktime movie, one encoded and burnt fine, the other did not!! I have raised ticket with ROXIO, but having seen some of the discussions on here I am not holding out much hope. I am trying to remember whether the successful disc was created with 10.0.6 or 10.0.7?

 

As suggested on here, I have made a couple of minor changes to the FCE project, I just moved a couple of title text tracks and I am re-exporting.

 

Will update later.

[IanW555]

I am also having this issue on my iMac 2Core 3.06ghz 4gb RAM running OSX 10.6.4. Funny thing though, I exported two projects from FCE 4.01 to Quicktime movie, one encoded and burnt fine, the other did not!! I have raised ticket with ROXIO, but having seen some of the discussions on here I am not holding out much hope. I am trying to remember whether the successful disc was created with 10.0.6 or 10.0.7?

 

As suggested on here, I have made a couple of minor changes to the FCE project, I just moved a couple of title text tracks and I am re-exporting.

 

Will update later.

 

Regressed back to 10.0.4 and still not working.

 

Interestingly, the film encoded perfectly under the DVD tab, but not under the Blu-Ray tab. If Roxio are not going to fix this then I do not see how the HD Plugin is "Fit for purpose" and therefore customers MUST be entitled to refund under "sale of goods act"?????????

 

Not had any response on my Roxio support call.

 

Ian.

[IanW555]

Regressed back to 10.0.4 and still not working.

 

Interestingly, the film encoded perfectly under the DVD tab, but not under the Blu-Ray tab. If Roxio are not going to fix this then I do not see how the HD Plugin is "Fit for purpose" and therefore customers MUST be entitled to refund under "sale of goods act"?????????

 

Not had any response on my Roxio support call.

 

Ian.

 

Support have given me a few things to try, will update later.

 

Ian.

[macpaddy]

Have had the same error until now. The original files were h.264, 1920x1080, AAC stereo audio, 44,100 kHz, 29.97fps (first one) and h.264, 1280x566, 24 fps AAC audio 44,100kHz for the second.

 

- I used QuickTime 7 Pro to export 'Movie to QuickTime Movie"

- Under 'Options/Video/Settings/ used Apple Intermediate Codec, Frame Rate: Current and Compressor to HDV 1080p for video 1 and HDV 720p for video 2.

- Size setting: Current

- For Sound, used the default Linear PCM, Stereo, 44,100kHz 16-bit.

 

Data rate of 1 movie ended up being 51 mbps, the other 22.4. Exported files now show AIC, 1440x1080, 16-bit linear stereo sound (video 1) and 1280x720 (video 2).

 

Dropped both these newly created files into Toast and set for Blu-ray on a single sided DVD-R and it worked. Played it back on a Panasonic Blu-ray player and all is fine.

I'm not sure where the exact issue is/was (audio codec, video codec etc...) but the above mentioned steps worked. I'll be playing with this some more later on.

 

 

My first project after the update failed overnight with the dreaded -18771 error.

 

Heavy sigh. <img src="http://forums.support.roxio.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="sad.gif" />

[IanW555]

After working with Roxio support for over a week, tough when it takes a whole night to try their suggestions, I now have it working. After going through the default re-install stuff (I am now running 10.0.7 again), they finally came up with changing the Toast Max Bit Rate in the custom encoding section from 17mbs to 14mbs. Made this change and it works fine.

 

I am still awaiting a response as to why I should need to change this given that the previous project from the same camera encoded perfectly at 17mbs.

 

Ian.

[Ustica]

Did you get an answer? I have exactly the same issue with these guys.

 

After working with Roxio support for over a week, tough when it takes a whole night to try their suggestions, I now have it working. After going through the default re-install stuff (I am now running 10.0.7 again), they finally came up with changing the Toast Max Bit Rate in the custom encoding section from 17mbs to 14mbs. Made this change and it works fine.

 

I am still awaiting a response as to why I should need to change this given that the previous project from the same camera encoded perfectly at 17mbs.

 

Ian.

[stevemca]

After working with Roxio support for over a week, tough when it takes a whole night to try their suggestions, I now have it working. After going through the default re-install stuff (I am now running 10.0.7 again), they finally came up with changing the Toast Max Bit Rate in the custom encoding section from 17mbs to 14mbs. Made this change and it works fine.

 

I am still awaiting a response as to why I should need to change this given that the previous project from the same camera encoded perfectly at 17mbs.

 

Ian.

 

Does changing this setting have much effect on the finished video?

 

Steve

[ComPH]

Actually my files are very similar to what pruthe described previously. The camcorder is Sony HDR-SR11, AVCHD, 1920x1080x60i, 2channel stereo, ingested, edited and output without any additional processing by FCE as {aic}.mov files, brought into the Toast. I cannot speculate if there are dropped frames or what the issue is, I only know the symptoms. FCE should certainly be one of the editors considered as a standard in the OS-X systems. The streams are no problem when the target is BD. The only other thing is that it is happening on great many different videos of different lengths etc. The only thing that is consistent is the bug. What is frustrating, is that it is happening to many people, that it is very consistent and repeatable (in my case), that Roxio keeps repeating in their manual that it works and that there is no support. If Roxio bought bad codec, is possible, but how do I use that fact to get this working? I am not using any titling or anything exotic. I feel like I an alpha tester..... I appreciate everyone's effort to help with this. I would have not even say anything, if I didn't see the continuous posts on this issue. At least now I kno that it works for some of the people. I wish Roxio was 1% as helpful as the members of this forum are trying to be. I will just tune out again, and live with the results I am having. I have other things to do with my time, that are lot more productive.

[ComPH]

@pruthe: I tried to duplicate your environment as close as possible, that gives you good results, after first thrashing the original settings, unfortunately I keep having the same errors and crashes. Using 10.0.7, "Best" auto-settings as well as manual, with and without audio, still the same error message after about an hour of preparing the files for the burner, the dreaded error message is back. I understand that not everyone is having this problem, but enough people do for Roxio to look into it and address the issue openly. When I contact the support, I am obviously communicating with someone in India or so, who is reading some sort of FAQ script and is not really systems savvy. IMHO, this means that the prolem requires a knowledgeable engineer with access to the source code, who should be able to analyze what happened betwee 10.0.2 and subsequent releases, what the difference is when processing BD and DVD, and what can bring up that error message. I personally do not use any other features of the application except for burning video discs from Final Cut, and it doesn't, and never worked really well. I spend unreasonable amount of time trying to troubleshoot this, with no help from Roxio. So dissapointing.. Thank you for your help. You gave me more of it than Roxio ever did.

[ComPH]

This is very helpful. I really appreciate it. It should help me to isolate where the problem is. Unfortunately at the time of 10.0.3, the OS went through a major update, so something might have happened there. Again, thanks.

[pruthe]

Pruthe, this is really helpful. Could you please describe the streams? What resolution are you using, i/p, 50/60Hz, what audio encode/bit rate? What are exactly all your Toast settings? I would really appreciate your answer, and try to duplicate the stream/Toast settings, to eliminate variables. Thank you very much for the post.

 

I have FCE 4.01 setup for AVCHD AIC 1920x1080/60i. Source video from Sony prosumer/consumer level hard drive high-def cameras. For Toast, no Disc options set. Only Menu option set was to include scene menus for video. (Need to pass chapter markers from FCE in exported .mov.) For encoding, I just used "Best" video quality in Toast because it's worked pretty well for me so far. I think Toast figures out optimal encode rates when use "Best" setting based on size of source video, but I used VideoSpec program to get more details from main m2ts file. Hope this helps.

 

***** First Analyzed File Results *****

 

*** General Parameters ***

- Name: 00001.m2ts

- Container: Mpeg Transport Stream

- Creation Date: 2010-05-18 11:33:02 PM

- Size: 3954.6 MiB

- Duration: 00:34:32.00

- Bitrate: 16.0 Mbps

- Encoding Library: Undefined

- Encoding Application: Undefined

 

*** Video Track Parameters ***

- Format: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

- Size: 3.66 GiB (95%)

- FourCC: 0x10000005

- Track number(s): 4113

- Bitrate: Max.: Undefined

Average: 15.2 Mbps

Min.: Undefined

- Frame rate (fps): Max.: Undefined

Average: 29.970

Min.: Undefined

- Bitrate mode: Undefined

- Encoding profile: High@L4.1

- Resolution: 24 bits

- Width (Pixel number): 1920

- Height (Pixel number): 1080

- Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1:1

- Display aspect ratio: 16:9

- Chroma subsampling format: YUV420p

- TV standard: NTSC

- Interlacing: Macroblock-Level Adaptive Frame/Field

- Encoding library: Undefined

- Additional Parameters: CABAC: Yes

Reference Frames: 4

Bits/(Pixel*Frame) ratio: 0.244

 

*** Audio Track(s) Parameters ***

- Format: AC3-A52

- Size: 47.4 MiB (1%)

- FourCC: 0x2000

- Number(s) and language(s): 4352 (0x1100): Undefined

- Details: -

- Profile: Undefined

- Bitrate: 192 Kbps

- Bitrate mode: Constant

- Resolution: Undefined

- Rate: 48.0 KHz

- Channel(s): 2 (stereo)

- Position: Left Right

- Encoding Library: Undefined

- Additional Parameters: Not available

 

*** Miscellaneous ***

- Subtitle(s): No Subtitle

- Metadata: Album: Undefined

Part number: Undefined

Track name: Undefined

Track name number: Undefined

Performer: Undefined

Screenplayer/Writer: Undefined

Genre: Undefined

Encoded date: Undefined

Comment: Undefined

Album artist: Undefined

Grouping: Undefined

Copyright: Undefined

[ComPH]

I normally burn my HD project to BD-R, and haven't tried creating a BD on DVD since Toast 9, but thought I'd try it again just to see if it works. I took a 30 minute project edited from FCE 4.01 with about 25 chapters and passed exported .mov file (source from AIC) into Toast 10.0.7 as Blu-ray video, with scene menus for video option on, "Best" video quality. I successfully created a BD-R on Toast using this same project a couple of days ago. ......

 

Pruthe, this is really helpful. Could you please describe the streams? What resolution are you using, i/p, 50/60Hz, what audio encode/bit rate? What are exactly all your Toast settings? I would really appreciate your answer, and try to duplicate the stream/Toast settings, to eliminate variables. Thank you very much for the post.

[tsantee]

WayneH. I just had another success with a 1:15:32 h.264 movie that my brother created using FCP from a combination of video shot with a professional Panasonic HDV camera and still images. I used your 15 mbps average and 17 mbps maximum and MP4 encoding but didn't do anything special with the audio track. It took nearly 8 hours to encode on my recent Intel iMac. My brother had scaled the h.264 as 1440x810, 29.97 fps and the audio is MPEG 4. The original file is only 3.19 GB but tripled in size using those bit rate settings.

 

You may be onto something regarding the demuxing of the audio and video streams. I wonder if the failure happens when Toast tries to re-encode the audio rather then when it is trying to re-encode the video stream.

 

I share the frustration many users have that Roxio doesn't list known issues so we can tell if our issue is one they know about and hopefully are trying to fix. It certainly would assist their customer support folks, too. I sense their Mac development team is not large and a lot of their time goes into developing new versions and products so the company can be making money from more sales. They might find it desirable to establish a alpha and beta testing group. You laugh (and cringe) at the thought of being part of that. Same here. But Roxio needs more horses.

[WayneH]

I normally burn my HD project to BD-R, and haven't tried creating a BD on DVD since Toast 9, but thought I'd try it again just to see if it works. I took a 30 minute project edited from FCE 4.01 with about 25 chapters and passed exported .mov file (source from AIC) into Toast 10.0.7 as Blu-ray video, with scene menus for video option on, "Best" video quality. I successfully created a BD-R on Toast using this same project a couple of days ago. I then requested disk image of BD on DVD. Toast went through encoding of I think about 3 hours and created disk image of 4.16GB. (The disk image size of same project as BD-R was 6.57GB.) Then burned this disk image onto DVD-R using internal burner. No problems encountered. I loaded this DVD on my Sony Blu-ray player (S-301) and player said loading AVCHD. Menu displayed fine (including chapters) and HD video played fine. So I didn't encounter any errors during this one test.

 

My computer is Mac Pro (Intel) with 8GB memory, 10.6.3. My 2 internal burners are LG blu-ray drives. I store my video files on both internal and external SATA drives (no RAID). Hope this helps.

Glad to hear it worked so well for you. It works for me too, just not reliably. I'm envious of your Intel-powered encode times!!

 

FWIW, I re-ran overnight my encode that failed yesterday but this time I started with the same movie but without the audio. The encode finished and when paired with my .ac3 surround file, it went ahead thru multiplexing. So the cure for -18771 in this case was to remove the audio track. Maybe a coincidence, or maybe a clue.

[pruthe]

I normally burn my HD project to BD-R, and haven't tried creating a BD on DVD since Toast 9, but thought I'd try it again just to see if it works. I took a 30 minute project edited from FCE 4.01 with about 25 chapters and passed exported .mov file (source from AIC) into Toast 10.0.7 as Blu-ray video, with scene menus for video option on, "Best" video quality. I successfully created a BD-R on Toast using this same project a couple of days ago. I then requested disk image of BD on DVD. Toast went through encoding of I think about 3 hours and created disk image of 4.16GB. (The disk image size of same project as BD-R was 6.57GB.) Then burned this disk image onto DVD-R using internal burner. No problems encountered. I loaded this DVD on my Sony Blu-ray player (S-301) and player said loading AVCHD. Menu displayed fine (including chapters) and HD video played fine. So I didn't encounter any errors during this one test.

 

My computer is Mac Pro (Intel) with 8GB memory, 10.6.3. My 2 internal burners are LG blu-ray drives. I store my video files on both internal and external SATA drives (no RAID). Hope this helps.

[WayneH]

I've browsed through your previous posts and think Roxio should contact you for beta testing Blu-ray encoding.

Hah! Well that made me chuckle! Coming from the approach that I want it to "just work", I think I'd rather have hemorrhoids than subject myself to any more testing than I've suffered already.

 

Workflow details: I'm working on a dual G5 PowerMac, using Leopard 10.5.8 and iMovie '09 to edit HDV footage from my Canon camera. From iMovie, I've been exporting to AIC 1440 x 1080, with PCM Big Endian sound at 16 bit, 48kHz. (I haven't nailed it down, but in general it seems more likely to make it thru an encode if I delete the sound track first. That's fine for my workflow, read on.) The movie file is dragged into the Toast window, with the Green background and the Blu-ray to DVD options selected. I've set the encoding to AVC at 15 average, 17 max, because I'm trying to max out the quality. It may be borderline but it does work in general. I click on "save as disk image" and, when it works, rescue the .264 file that shows up in the "Roxio Converted Items" folder. Don't quit before you move it!

 

Audio goes a different way. I drag the movie file into Soundtrack Pro and export the audio as a pair of mono .aif files, one for each channel. Oh, important step here, I make sure the audio timeline matches the video exactly in length. iMovie will actually export a shorter audio file when the move ends with a fade to silent background. In Toast, a short audio file will later be stretched to fit the video, and this causes havoc with sync. Been there, done that. Anyway, then I drag the L and R files into Compressor and let it prepare an .ac3 file surround mix. My "simple" mix is just duplicating the fronts to the surrounds, and letting Compressor make an LFE and center channel. I've also made a more complicated mix with music, which is what started this awful torture.

 

The video and audio are reunited by giving them the same name, eg. movie.264 and movie.ac3, and placing them in the same folder. Then when you drag the .264 into the Toast window (same settings exactly as before), it will find the audio file and mate it up. If it doesn't see it, it'll ask. Then when you hit "save to image" again, and all goes as hoped, it will skip re-encoding and go straight to multiplexing. No sweeter feeling than when it works!

 

My current project was one big movie and one smaller one. To isolate my problems, I ended up slicing the big piece into 3. So of the 4 total pieces, all 7-11 minutes now, 3 can be placed together on a disk image successfully using the process above. I'm struggling now with the 4th and final piece.

 

FWIW, I do see timing issues where Toast sees the .264 as being a different duration than the movie file it started as. That seems likely to cause problems but the file with the worst discrepancy is working fine. I've also suspected that titling errors caused by iMovie might be mucking things up. iMovie seems to have trouble exporting titles at HD resolution (dropping down a bit in res clears it up). My one remaining problem piece does contain some "fancy" moving titles. They look OK when previewed in Quicktime (unlike some others I've removed) but I'm wondering about them. Deleting them is probably the next thing to try if the current encode fails.

 

That's about all I can think of. It's a tough nut and I swear I've had success by simply re-trying a failed attempt. Hardly a solution. Oh, another wild idea: Is it possible a Toast encode can fail simply because it has taken so long? I mean, these things have sometimes gone two days just to quit unexpectedly at the end, but not before deleting the encoding .264 file. Could it be that the Mac's maintenance scripts are interfering, or the change in date is confusing Toast? Just grabbing at straws here, but it does see that the separate pieces are far more likely to succeed than one big file.