Advice Sought: Avhcd Archive Option In Toast 10

[Hoof Hearted]

I have been borrowing my Dad's Panasonic HD camcorder when I go on holiday. It uses SHDC cards and I use iMovie to edit/play/share the contents. Over time I find that I now have two 8GB SDHC cards each partially filled with holiday video captured over several years.

 

Prompted by the purchase of a Fuji FinePix W3 3D camera that uses SDHC cards I thought I would archive the contents of these cards to DVD+R then erase them in order that I may then allocate, either one or the other, to the Fuji 3D camera.

 

As it stands the data on both SDHC cards will fit on a single DVD with room to spare. In fact one card has 1.9 GB, the other 1.16 GB.

 

Playing with the AVCHD Archive option in Toast 10 it seems to me that I can only burn the contents of these cards one at a time. Thus requiring a second session to burn the second card to another separate DVD and so wasting the space on the first DVD.

 

I'm a relative newbie to burning DVDs and such, but my understanding (up to now) is that only CD's support multi session burning; DVDs and BDR discs do not. However I need to burn both cards to my chosen DVD in one go.

 

Hence my question; Am I wrong - DVD/BDRs can be burned multi-session? Or is there is a workaround using Toast 10 to permit archiving more that one SDHC card to a single DVD (or Blue Ray) disc at one go? I realise the Toast 10 can do this in other situations but the files on my SdHC cards are not VIDEO_TS as far as I know.

 

So, to sum up, I have two or more partially filled SDHC cards used in an AVHCD camera that I m trying to work out how to "archive" to a single DVD/BDR disc.

[tsantee]

What I'd do in your case is use the DVD-Rom (UDF) setting in the Toast Data window and burn the contents of both cards to one DVD.

 

You are correct about no multisession burning to DVD media on a Mac. As for Blu-ray discs, my understanding is it requires rewritable Blu-ray media that you first format for Dynamic Writing via the Toast Recorder menu. Once you do that the Blu-ray disc acts like a slow hard drive or flash drive where you can add or delete content. The downside (other than speed) is the disc can only be read by your Blu-ray drive. It's one of those things that is doable, buy why not use a flash drive instead?

[Hoof Hearted]

Thanks Tsantee

 

I've some BD-RWs hanging around. I'll start playing around with them and Toast tomorrow.

 

The stuff's only for archive purposes so for me write speed isn't an issue. However, I'm not sure what you mean by "the disc can only be read by your Blu-ray drive". Do you mean, if my Blue ray drive dies and I replace it with, say, the same make and model, the replacement won't be able to retrieve the data? I've heard something along such lines relating to RAID 1 HDDs created by MacOS compared with RAID 1 HDDs that are created with the hardware's own software/firmware. I heard this some years ago and never followed it up so my recall may be somewhat inaccurate.

[tsantee]

No, I meant by a Blu-ray drive. Sorry for the confusion. I'd like to know your experience with the dynamic writing. I don't think anyone has ever posted here or in the Toast 11 forum about how it well it works. Maybe I should give it a try.