New To Hd Burning

[spu]

i'm embarrassed to say i'm still a user of toast 6. now that i have an AVCHD video camera, it's apparent that i need to upgrade a few things to get a better quality DVD for viewing on TV. i'm on a mac, ready to update to 10.7. could someone give me a few starting points on what's the best way to import from the video camera (using toast 11?), editing (using imovie or toast?) exporting and burning (again, using toast, instead of iDVD?)

 

and i'm assuming i'll need a new HD DVD and / or Blu Ray recorder? any advice on brands or quality? is amazon a good choice for purchasing? or does roxio have their own burner?

 

thanks in advance for your help. i'll read through the tips and many of the posts here to try and learn more as well.

 

susan

[tsantee]

Rather than buying a Blu-ray recorder I suggest using a device that can stream the video from your Mac to the TV. The advantage of Blu-ray discs is you can send them to others but if that isn't important then consider saving yourself all the time it takes to make Blu-ray discs. Toast 11 with the Blu-ray plugin can burn high-definition Blu-ray videos to regular DVDs but their length has to be short enough to fit. Since these are home movies it may work out that way for many of your videos.

 

Importing directly to iMovie gives you the opportunity to edit and customize your video. Toast can read the iMovie Project file so you don't have to export from iMovie before adding to Toast. That's a big time saver. Toast 11 also has a setting for making backup discs of your raw AVCHD video from the camera.

 

Hopefully some others will pitch in here with more detailed information about Blu-ray drives and AVCHD imports.

[spu]

thank you for the information. does imovie encode or compress when importing? i'm currently using imovie '09, which i plan to upgrade soon. is iDVD necessary? or does toast take the place of iDVD? i'm intrigued by toast making backup discs of the raw footage - that's a huge plus.

 

my concern with keeping everything on my hard drive (or one of my 3 externals), it that i'm rapidly running out of space, so moving files off is somewhat important. though being able to stream directly to the TV, esp. with photos, is a great feature.

 

what do you use to stream from the mac to the TV? i've been looking into apple tv, but heard conflicting info about weather it can stream movies or pix/slideshows from iphoto or itunes on the mac, or just from ipads and ipods, or just from the cloud.

 

thanks again,

susan

 

 

Rather than buying a Blu-ray recorder I suggest using a device that can stream the video from your Mac to the TV. The advantage of Blu-ray discs is you can send them to others but if that isn't important then consider saving yourself all the time it takes to make Blu-ray discs. Toast 11 with the Blu-ray plugin can burn high-definition Blu-ray videos to regular DVDs but their length has to be short enough to fit. Since these are home movies it may work out that way for many of your videos.

 

Importing directly to iMovie gives you the opportunity to edit and customize your video. Toast can read the iMovie Project file so you don't have to export from iMovie before adding to Toast. That's a big time saver. Toast 11 also has a setting for making backup discs of your raw AVCHD video from the camera.

 

Hopefully some others will pitch in here with more detailed information about Blu-ray drives and AVCHD imports.

[tsantee]

thank you for the information. does imovie encode or compress when importing? i'm currently using imovie '09, which i plan to upgrade soon. is iDVD necessary? or does toast take the place of iDVD? i'm intrigued by toast making backup discs of the raw footage - that's a huge plus.

 

my concern with keeping everything on my hard drive (or one of my 3 externals), it that i'm rapidly running out of space, so moving files off is somewhat important. though being able to stream directly to the TV, esp. with photos, is a great feature.

 

what do you use to stream from the mac to the TV? i've been looking into apple tv, but heard conflicting info about weather it can stream movies or pix/slideshows from iphoto or itunes on the mac, or just from ipads and ipods, or just from the cloud.

 

thanks again,

susan

iDVD is only standard definition. So if you are shooting HD and wanting it to remain that way you need Toast with the Blu-ray plugin. Toast can also make standard-definition video DVDs (from either SD or HD sources) if you want. Toast does this differently from iDVD which can be either better or worse depending on your objective.

 

Your version of iMovie should import the video directly without re-encoding. But it will get re-encoded by Toast when making it either a Blu-ray or DVD video. You may also be able to import directly to Toast (I don't have an AVCHD camcorder so don't know about this) but even if you can't there are other ways to get the video onto the hard drive such as using QuickTime.

 

AppleTV can play video streaming from your Mac if it is in iTunes. I use a WDTV Live which can play from any network connected computer or drive and from a portable hard drive plugged into the unit. I'd take a look at the Boxee box to see what it can do and also see if any of the Blu-ray players that have Wifi can stream from a Mac. I'm buying a Sony Blu-ray player tomorrow so I'll know what it can do in a few days.

 

If you buy Toast as a download from Roxio's online store you can return it within 30 days for a refund if you're not satisfied. Every version of Toast has bugs so some things don't work as they should. But for the most part Toast can do a lot of what you want very well. It also includes an editor where you can easily mark segments to leave out of the final disc or export.

[spu]

thanks again for the info! very helpful.

 

it seems as though my old version of toast is pretty archaic... see screenshot... looks like the toast 11 pro does quite a bit more than simply burning a cd or dvd. next step is to look into blu ray recorders.