Burning Standard F.c.p. Movies Onto A Blu-Ray Dvd

[NDP]

Has anyone burned Final Cut 7 movies to a Blu-ray with Toast Pro 11? I can only fit about 4.25hrs of standard movies on the single layer Blu-ray. I have been told a Blu-ray will hold 9 hrs of standard def movies. Do I need to compress the movies?

[tsantee]

I haven't burned any SD videos to Blu-ray discs so I don't know how Toast goes about doing that. However, my guess from your description is that Toast's minimum automatic bit rate for Blu-ray is higher than what is used for SD video. So there are a couple ways you can proceed.

 

One is to click the quality button and choose Custom to enter the custom encoder settings window. There you'll see sliders for maximum and minimum bit rates and also a choice of MPEG 2 or MPEG 4 encoding. A SD video DVD is MPEG 2 with a bit rate typically from 4 to 7 mbps. So you might choose those settings.

 

The other method is probably how I'd do it. First, change the Toast Preferences/Storage to Never delete converted items. I'd choose DVD video as the format in the Video window and add about 2-1/2 hours of video. Then I choose Save as Disc Image. I'd do that for additional videos as well. That way I have all my videos in MPEG 2 format. After this I can switch to the Blu-ray video mode in Toast. Next I go to the Roxio Converted Items folder in the Documents folder in the Finder and drag one of the .m2v files into Toast. Toast probably will ask for the corresponding .ac3 audio file. I do the same for the other .m2v files. The next step is to prepare the menu. Then I click the Custom button for quality and in the custom encoder settings window choose Never re-encode. When clicking the burn button or saving a disc image I expect to see Multiplexing rather than Encoding and should have a Blu-ray video disc full of SD videos.