Making a Blu-ray disc image: Compressor and Create Disc (BlurayPublishingServer?) in some kind of feedback loop?

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Making a Blu-ray disc image: Compressor and Create Disc (BlurayPublishingServer?) in some kind of feedback loop?

Trying to burn a Blu-ray hard drive image of my 90 minute 720P Self-contained Quicktime file using Compressor's "Create Blu-ray Disc" feature, I'm now into hour 15 or so and no image is showing up in Disk Utility's window, starting to give up hope, abandon this whole Bluray thing, hoping someone's gone through this before and has any insight...

Compressor (allegedly) finished its process, as the progress bar disappeared, although where there usually is a time estimate it still reads "Unknown", as it did for the first 8 hours while the progress bar crept along...

A "BDMV" folder has appeared on the desktop, in which the largest folder is something called "DB" and it's only 9GB. MovieObject.xml is 8kb and an "Image" folder is empty.

Activity Monitor is showing Compressor and "BlurayPublishingServer" bouncing back and forth as the most active programs, with BlurayPub... averaging around 30% of CPU and Compressor between 10 and 20%. The crazy thing is, under "Disk Usage" the Space Free seems to be in some kind of loop; it keeps counting down from 148,381,700,000 bytes to 148,379,000,000 bytes, then jumping back up to 148,381,700,000 (round numbers). Is that something computers do in the course of rendering/processing (rewrite over data) and should I give it another 12 hours, or is my poor old 2006 Macbook Pro just not up to this?

In that first 8-hour sprint Compressor seems to have sucessfully created the H.264 and .ac3 files - 20GB and 123MB respectively. So now it's trying to make the disc image, right? The little "Create Disc" popup thing looks pretty full. But still no image in Disk Utility, and Activity Monitor still showing something going on.

A couple notes: I did a successful burn by sending it straight to my external LG Bluray burner yesterday. It took around 10 hours, but it came out great. I need to make more copies of this Bluray, so when it prompted "burn again?" I put another disk in and hit the yes button... and... it just sat there. Nothing. No spinning the optical drive, no progress bar, nothing. I gave it a few hours, still no activity. Cancelled it, rebooted, tried ripping a copy with Disk Utility, but after reading it and creating what looked like a disc image, it gave me the "media doesn't have enough space" error some other people have reported when trying to burn it on a blank disc. So... I'm thinking the best thing to do is just burn a disc image. Which brings me to here, and hour 16 of this third attempt (actually the first thing I tried was Final Cut's Share - Bluray thing, which was a 20 hour waste of electricity, ending in hangup and reboot). Maybe MAC doesn't like making Blu-ray disc images? Maybe my Mac is being pushed too hard?

I guess the most helpful info would be - does that Activity Monitor behavior sound cool or should I abort... and is there anything I can do with those H.264 and .ac3 files... Any paid program, even Toast, is out of my rach right now... I know, you need a disc image, but... I really can't spend 10 hours compressing and burning EACH disc... Aaargh! Afraid to shut this thing down. Will let it chew overnight.

Much appreciated if anyone's made it all the way through this epic post!

Compressor, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Sep 26, 2012 8:37 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Sep 27, 2012 6:14 AM in response to Michigan Shooter

Have you seen this thread about Disk Utility's space message and different Blu Ray media?

As to your other questions, I have very limited BluRay experience; the few times when I made a disk image it was for someone else's use or for testing workflows, but I know I didn't get into any weird encoding loops. As you know,the progress bar is pretty obscure by nature; alternatively, open up Batch Monitor and click on the info button do see what percentage has been complete.

Assuming by now that you've canceled the job, I would downloadDigital Rebellion's Compressor Repairtool (free) and run that – including the trash preferences option. Also, I've had occasions when job actions started to act up and were cured by running repair permissions in Dick Utility.

My impression is that the people who use disk images with Toast are happy with the results. So even if it's not something you get now, perhaps it's the long term solution.

Good luck.

Russ

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Answer 2

Sep 27, 2012 7:21 AM in response to Russ H

Thanks Russ - I did see that thread but at the time was frantically looking for the parts about Compressor and Create Disc, etc; the writable/re-writable media might indeed be the issue - I've been trying all this on write-once discs. Maybe I'll pick up one or some re-writable blanks today and see if that works. Seems counter-intuitive but sometimes the strangest things happen!

I did cancel the thing this morning after almost 24 hours - it was still working and getting nowhere - but will be trying this whole thing again later today, with ripping the already-made bluray and trying again, and probably going all the way through Compressor and burning immediately instead of "burn to hard drive" - at which time I'll definitely try your advice and click on the Batch Monitor's info button. Can't believe I didn't think of that before!

Will also try Compressor repair, trash prefs and repair permissions - all after trying the simplest solution (different disc media) hopefully which will solve the whole thing. And once I'm rich, Toast is on the way.

Thanks again!

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Answer 3

Sep 28, 2012 6:05 AM in response to Michigan Shooter

For Blu-ray encoding, I've seen compressor fail like this on encoding clips longer than 10 minutes. It doesn't happen on all BD burners, as the Sony BD burner seems to be works consistently with compressor. I've contact Apple about this, but the Pro Apps team is so busy working on other things that nothing has happened. I have worked arround this by using Toast to pick up the pieces left over by compressor and burned them on Blu-ray. It's a two step process, but it's worth it. Compressor has excellent H.264 encoding while Toast has excellent BD suppport. I would never have Toast encode anything, as the video quality is inferior to compressor.

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Answer 4

Sep 30, 2012 8:31 AM in response to Michigan Shooter

Ok, an update in case anyone else has this problem; for me anyway, the rewritable blu-ray media seems to be the solution (for burning from disk utility). Weird. Verbatim BD-RE disks. It would be nice if the inkjet printable blu-ray media was cheaper but this will do for now.

Still don't know why Compressor couldn't make a disk image directly but here's what worked for me:

- 10 hour Compressor render-and-burn from self-contained QT (could only make one disc, it tied itself up upon trying to make a 2nd right away)

- Making a disc image from that burnt disc (about a half hour for a 90 min. video)

- Burning more discs onto rewritable blu-rays (BD-RE) using Disk Utility (about a half hour each)

Hope this helps save someone days of trial-and-error!

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Answer 5

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Sep 30, 2012 8:50 AM in response to Michigan Shooter

Thanks for updating us. Glad it worked.

Russ

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