Blu-ray Report
Despite the awesome graphic above, this post is not a robust product comparison of DVD Studio Pro and Adobe Encore. But I did have reason to sway from DVD Studio Pro recently because I wanted to be able to burn Blu-ray discs on my Mac. DVD Studio Pro won’t do it, Encore does. A few people wanted to know what my experience was, so here it is.
The reason for Blu-ray was simple. I was screening this short at a festival and to screen it in full-on 1080 HD, I could either supply them with an HDCAM master or Blu-ray. Getting an HDCAM master made is expensive and I thought I might want to make more Blu-ray discs in the future so I jumped in and bought a LaCie Blu-ray Recordable drive. The discs themselves are relatively cheap at about $10. I can also burn discs in 5.1 surround sound, which is neat.
To get there I had to do a couple easy things. One—I up-rezed the footage from 720 pixels (which we shot in) to 1080. Two—I brought it into Encore, made a menu with a play button and burned a disc. It was amazing how simple it was. I paid a lot of money for FCP Studio and it’s frustrating Apple hasn’t gotten around to supporting Blu-ray yet. Anyway, no matter. Encore was so easy to use I may just switch altogether. Plus, the integration with Photoshop is pretty slick. I didn’t really get into the software enough to put it through its paces but it looks great so far.
The print looked great in a huge theater! We shot on the HVX-200 in 720/24p with an adapter and cinema lenses, blew it up to 1080 for the master and when you watch it in a huge theater, it looks like film. Kind of amazing really.
So there you go. I hope that helps the other film/video people out there that have been helping me with advice and moral support.
