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Not happy with quality of Toast Blu-ray video

I have created twenty H.264 QT movies by Sharing from FCP X. Each is a song from a band performance. I am now burning a Blu-ray video using Toast Titanium (version 11.1). The test discs I have created are disappointing. The quality degradation is not huge, like you see in going to the Internet, but it is noticeable in the skin tones.


My custom settings in Toast are:

Video format: MPEG-4 AVC

Average bit rate: 15.0 Mbps

Maximum bit rate: 20.0 Mbps

Motion estimation: Best

Re-encoding: Never

Field Dominance: Automatic

Aspect ratio: 16:9

Audio Format: PCM, 48KHz, 24-bit, stereo.


Even though I set it to "Never" re-encode, Toast is re-encoding when I burn. I tried going to a Disc Image rather than a Blu-ray disc just to see what would happen, and in this case it multiplexed rather than re-encoded, and this went much faster.


Questions:

1. Are there different settings you would recommend?

2. Why is Toast re-encoding when I tell it to "Never" re-encode? Since the QT movies are H.264, 48 KHz 24-bit PCM audio, what exactly is it re-encoding?

3. Is there a better way to make high quality Blu-ray videos, using something other than Toast?

_______________________________________

2010 Mac Pro Dual Quad, OS 10.8.1

Blu-ray burner is: OWC Mercury Pro 12X Blu-ray+DVD/CD Burner FireWire 800/400 (made by Pioneer)

Final Cut Pro X, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1), Mac Pro 2 x 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel

Posted on Sep 14, 2012 10:00 AM

Reply
34 replies

Sep 14, 2012 3:38 PM in response to Ian R. Brown

I have to admit I didn't spend much time looking at it, but:

(1) I need to burn 20 songs, each from an individual FCP X Project, not just a clip from one project

(2) I want PCM stereo audio, not Dolby.


I didn't see how to do these, although like I said, I didn't spend much time on it.

Toast is easy to use, I just can't get any help at the Roxio forum on my questions. Everybody is asleep over there. My questions are pretty simple for a Toast expert..............


I could use Compressor, but it has been a pain every time I have tried using it.

Sep 14, 2012 6:56 PM in response to Michael Holmes1

I was told at the Roxio forum that:

(1) There is no way to avoid re-encoding if you go to Toast with H.264.

(2) I could alternatively go FCP X --> Compressor and generate MPEG2 --> Toast, and Toast would not re-encode the MPEG2.


Does anybody have a recommended path from FCP X to Blu-ray that will lead to the best quality Blu-ray video?


Requirements:

- These are a collection of songs from a band performance, so I must be able to export multiple Project files from FCP X

- I must have a menu on the Blu-ray disk, so the user can play different songs

- Audio quality is very important, so I need to be able to use PCM stereo (48kHz, 24-bit).


I can get all these things with Toast............I just have to go thru the encoding. Best route?

Sep 29, 2012 2:07 PM in response to Michael Holmes1

I have found that there is only one way to get really good BluRay disks - you have to swallow REALLY hard and buy Adobe Encore. Unfortunately Adobe ONLY bundles this with Premiere - which means you have to fork out for Premiere as well even though you don't need to use it at all!


Having taken this plunge I have been able to make really good BR disks with full menus. You can import multilayer menus from Photoshop and even edit them in PS from within Encore. They finally have chapter playlists working so you can easily bunch together and play individual episodes from different parts of the disk. I have just finished a 3-hour DL disk of multiple episodes and chapters from a long Mediterranean cruise and I am super pleased with the result. All the editing was done in FCP-X, exported as 7 separate ProRes video files and converted into BluRay H264 using Compressor.


Having fiddled around trying to make BR disks from Toast and being very dissatisfied with the poor menus and navigation it was a real pleasure to work with all the tools in Encore.


Of course, you have to learn how to use Encore - I learnt most of it from the MacProVideo tutorial!


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2009 iMac i5, OS 10.8.2

OWC Mercury Pro Firewire with Pioneer BD-RW BDR-206D

FCP-X 10.0.5, Compressor 4.0.3, Encore CS6, Photoshop CS6

Sep 29, 2012 3:13 PM in response to GerryL

Please help me understand the logic:

(1) I am also working in FCP X. What is the advantage of going through Compressor, versus exporting to H.264 in FCP X?

(2) You find Compressor simple to use for this purpose? Long encoding times?

(3) Aside from menus/navigation, is there any reason Encore should produce better quality Blu-ray videos than Toast Titanium?

(4) What settings do you use (bit rate, etc.) to get the good quality?

(5) Any problems with Blu-rays players not being able to handle your bit rates?


Thanks!

Sep 30, 2012 10:58 AM in response to Michael Holmes1

Exporting directly via FCP-X will probably give just as good quality (because it uses Compressor anyway), but I have 2 major reasons for going through Compressor as a separate action:


1. By using compressor I have the flexibility to change parameters. On the recent project I had to reduce from 9Mbps max (6.2Mbps average) to 7.5Mbps max (5Mbps average) to accommodate it on a DL DVD.

2. Exporting directly from FCP-X is limited to one export at a time. Going through Compressor I can set up a job which queues up all of my exports. In this case it was 7 segments with 4 exports for each segment (BR, NTSC, PAL, Audio) and I can go away and leave it to do its work.


Compressor uses ALL of my CPU (almost 100% of all 4 cores according to Activity Monitor) and so I get quite fast encoding times even with a 2009 iMac. For my over 3 hours of ProRes video and exporting to 3 different video standards I was completing the job in about 12-14 hours. That to me is great! I open up Compressor, drag all of the FCP-X exported files into the workspace, then select all of those files and drag each of the encode types into all of the files at once. I then select all files for each encode in turn and specify the Target folder (different for each type of encode). Its quite easy when you get the hang of it.


On the question of Encore quality, I do not use the Adobe compressor! It accepts the Apple Compressor encoded files and does not try to re-encode like Toast does. The main thing is the menus and navigation which in a complex disk are all-important.


I have been using the maximum Blu-Ray bit rate - 35Mbps max (30Mbps average) and have had no reports (yet!) of players not being able to handle this. This latest project required a double layer disk, of course. For myself I use a Sony PlayStation 3 and a 2 year old Sony BluRay player for my evaluations. The only time I had to restrict the bit rate was to put a HD project onto a regular DVD (to play in a BR player). Then I restricted the max bit rate to 15Mbps.


Hope this helps!

Oct 1, 2012 10:57 AM in response to Michael Holmes1

1. Export out of FCP X with Share:Blu-ray and choose Hard Drive to render out a disc image.

2. Fire up Toast and select Copy:Image File instead of Video:Blu-ray.

3. Drag the image file from the Finder into Toast

4. Burn it.


It won't encode anything, it's simply making a disc out of your disc image. I've been doing this with my feature film and it looks great, IMHO. I think it's 25Mbps, about 20 gigs for 2 hours.

Oct 1, 2012 11:41 AM in response to Michael Holmes1

Looks like Scott has the easiest answer if you have effectively a single contiguous movie and you don't need any menus! It certainly gets over the problem of Toast re-compressing your files! Having been using DVD Studio Pro for my DVD's - and being very satisied with their implementation for my purposes - I was upset with Apple for not implementing BR and being forced to use Toast with their extremely simplistic menu/navigation system! Of course I also rail at Adobe for making everyone buy their $600 Premiere just to get Encore! Most of my DVD's are of the documentary type and have multiple small videos which need good menus.


As to the bit-rate, although I haven't (yet) had any complaints about incompatibility you tweaked me to look into this some more and I did find some comments about compatibility with older players. Just as an exercise (but also possibly a fall-back position) I'm trying out a lower bit rate (about half) which might also enable me to get this project onto a single-layer disk. It will be interesting to see if the quality difference is noticeable.

Oct 1, 2012 1:51 PM in response to GerryL

Great information.

One complication for my work is that I am shooting live band performances and the end product is a video of each song. For the Internet, the product is simply a collections of H.264 QT movies. But when the product is Blu-ray, I usually have 25-30 individual songs, not one continuous video. So I have the same problem with poor menus.

Oct 14, 2012 7:17 PM in response to GerryL

GerryL,

I am looking hard at buying Premiere Pro CS6 to get Encore CS6.

Did you also buy any Menu Kits, or did you find this unnecessary?

Did you also need to buy After Effects?


I ask because I have watched an excellent "Authoring with Adobe Encore" tutorial here:

http://www.precomposed.com/tutorials/products/pro_motion_menu_kits/Encore_Author ing/


These folks offer some nice looking Menu Kits

http://www.precomposed.com/products/pro_motion_menu_kits/

but they use After Effects as well as Encore.

Oct 15, 2012 10:29 AM in response to Michael Holmes1

Hi Michael,


I do not use After Effects and I didn't buy any menu kits - but then my menus have been relatively simple. I do use a moving background but my buttons are a simple color-changing arrow/underline combination adjacent to a non-button word. I do sometimes include a still picture. Everything is built up in Photoshop. In the cruise travelog that I just completed there is a main menu and 7 sub-menus. 2 of the sub-menus are maps showing the ports of call with a button adjacent to each of those ports on the map. Nothing very complicated! It takes a bit of fiddling to make sure that the active button areas don't overlap but it looks good - and works! Once you have learnt the necessary layers for the button structure it's not hard. The nice thing about Encore is that you can link back into Photoshop and make changes without quitting Encore.


One thing you do need to know is that the button structure for the selected/activated layers is different for BluRay and DVD. My projects need versions for all 3 standards. I had to modify the menu button structure for BluRay because the NTSC/PAL button structure did not work properly. The training program I used (MacProVideo) explains the complete structure for DVD but does not tell you the differences for BluRay and I had to work it out for myself from the rather limited contents of the Help pages (I am retired so I have the time)! Of course, using preset menu templates would get over this problem. I noticed that the tutorial that you watched doesn't tell you about this difference.

Nov 26, 2012 3:57 PM in response to Scot Walker

Hi Scot


I'm burning AVCHD (Blu-ray) to DVD-Rs and have been pleased with the results as I'm just using the simple method of producing menus using labelled chapter markers in Compressor which is Ok for what I'm working on at the moment. The problem I have is when I try to produce a disc image of the resulting DVD-R. Disc Utility and Toast just fall over when the disc has finished reading, do you have any suggestions?


Here is the thread outlining my plight!


https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4544285


Thanks,


Quentin.

Nov 26, 2012 5:34 PM in response to Michael Holmes1

What I (and others) used to do with DVD Studio Pro is create a disc *image* and use Toast to burn the disc as a Data disc -- basically just copying the data created by the app to a disc. No re-encoding, no changing the data in any way. I haven't found whether that is a viable option with blu-ray discs in Toast, but it would keep Toast out of the encoding equation. The other benefit to this workflow is that you can "pre-flight" a disc before wasting money burning "coasters".

Nov 26, 2012 6:24 PM in response to fox_m

I followed GerryL's lead and signed on to Adobe Creative Cloud. I use:

- Media Encoder to convert the FCPX videos from ProRes 422 to H.264

- After Effects to configure menus (sometimes also using Photoshop), and

- Encore to author the Blu-ray videos.


For the Mac, nothing else touches Encore. I am very happy with the results. Gerry, glad I listened to you.

Not happy with quality of Toast Blu-ray video

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