Despite the fact that Apple is a member of the Blu-Ray Disk Alliance, it has up till now been somewhat reluctant to support the high definition format. With the release today of Final Cut Studio 3 Apple has finally decided to accept that Blu-Ray is something that its customers want. New in FCP 7 (or Final Cut Studio 3 – yes the numbering is confusing) is the ability to burn a Blu-Ray disk straight from Final Cut Pro itself, or from compressor. This is interesting because Apple’s disk authoring suite, DVD Studio Pro remains effectively untouched in this version and does not add Blu-Ray support. While this will probably be seen as controversial, I think this is a brilliant move from Apple.
Why? Well, I’ve worked in the post production industry for years, and the last 4 years in a post house that was all final cut based. Our primary use of DVD Studio Pro, and I suspect that this applies to many others, is to burn disks for client approval. We hardly ever used menus and if we did it was only to include multiple tracks. If our clients were getting commercial disks made, we would farm it out to someone using more sophisticated hardware and software. DVD Studio Pro, is a nice application, and even though it is often ridiculed by die hard DVD Authoring Professionals, it does seem to be widely used for authoring. However I suspect that the majority of Apple’s main Final Cut Customers, professional editors will be delighted to be able to burn straight to disk without having to go through DVD Studio Pro.
When it came to adding Blu-Ray to Final Cut I think Apple made the right choice not to try and break into that market yet. By offering simplified integrated burning Apple is probably fulfilling most of its customers needs, and I say this as both a customer and as someone who knows many people in the industry who have been waiting for this kind of support.
I’m sure some will complain loudly, and if DVD Studio Pro is vital to your business then I understand how you could be disappointed, but Apple are still shipping and supporting DVD Studio Pro 4. I hope Apple will release a Blu-Ray suite in the future, but for now I think they absolutely made the right decision with the way they’ve chosen to support Blu-Ray in Final Cut Studio 3. I suspect before long we will see Blu-Ray burners as a build to order option in Mac Pros.
Hopefully.
[Note: Article UPDATED to reflect input from the comments regarding DVDSP's commercial use - Thanks for the input]
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the amount of work to make menu’s for Blu-Ray is different than for DVD, with Blu-Ray having a much more advanced system. This would take longer to make usable in a package like DVD Studio, compared with just the burning support.
Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that. You can do DVD like menus relatively easily – it’s not much different from DVD and this is what Adobe Encore uses (which has had blu-ray support for 2 years now) To do the full pop up advanced menus that you see on many blu-ray disks requires BD-JAVA (from what I understand) and this is far more complicated all right. However it’s not Like Apple haven’t had the time to implement this if they chose to. If Adobe can do it there’s no reason Apple couldn’t.
But like I said, they may well be working on a replacement for DVD studio pro that does blu-ray, perhaps even selling it as a separate package
Oh and another thing, the implementation they have done does allow you to do basic menus.
whoops, right, was only thinking of the more complicated BD-JAVA, thanks for the additional info
> While certainly usable for small projects, I doubt many commercial disks were ever authored with it.
You would be wrong then. While DVD Studio Pro is not used for many ‘A’ titles, it is widely used for authoring ‘B’ & ‘C’ movies (and of course, porn).
One of the primary reasons that the big-time Hollywood authoring houses don’t like DSP is that they can’t use it to create their absurdly authored discs which attempt to prevent copying by futzing with the disc layout.
I would be happy to be proven wrong on that point. Heck, I like DVD studio pro. I think it’s a nice application. But the DVD Authoring Professionals I have talked to (who have authored several highly successful DVD’s) say they wouldn’t use it for commercial purposes because it has several compatibility issues, and that it doesn’t generate clean code. I’m just relaying what I’ve been told.
I would absolutely love a professional Blu-Ray authoring product from Apple but I still think they did this right for the majority of their Final Cut Pro customers
I’ve also heard that the code is less than optimal in some cases. I had not encountered the compatibility issues personally, but don’t doubt it.
My comment was more aimed at your point about not many commercial discs being made with DSP; that’s definitely not true (unless you’re limiting ‘commercial’ to mean ‘major Hollywood titles’).
Mike
(original DVD Studio Pro product manager, btw)
Could you please confirm the following for me guys
In the latest version of Final Cut 7 if I have my final edit on the time line and export to quicktime like I always do then I could burn this file onto a blu ray disc assuming I had a Blu Ray recorder in my G5 mac?
Or would I put the file through compressor first?
I can assure you that a large number of studios, some even at the Hollywood level, use DVDSP as their main authoring software. Scenarist is great, and since most professional studios need Blu-ray capability today, it is the top dog. However, many more studios out there create standard definition DVDs, and don’t want to pay for Scenarist; enter the reason why they use DVDSP.
-Bret
Thanks Mike and Bret – I’m glad to hear that it is more commonly used. It may be just the situation over here in northern europe then. Of course there is an element of inertia in the industry here too. The professionals I had talked to are die hard scenarist users, so they may be stretching the truth a little with me. I will amend article to reflect your input. Thanks
‘In the latest version of Final Cut 7 if I have my final edit on the time line and export to quicktime like I always do then I could burn this file onto a blu ray disc assuming I had a Blu Ray recorder in my G5 mac?
Or would I put the file through compressor first?’
Lee, you will need to ensure your timeline resolution is set at a HD resolution (1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720).
Export your edited film as a qicktime movie, not using quicktime conversion.
Then author your Blu-ray disc using Toast, with the Blu-ray plugin installed. You can create a Blu-ray disc on a DVD, but you will be limited by the length of video. Something like 40 mins of HD video on a DVD (authored as a Blu-ray disc).
You can’t play the disc back on your mac, because it doesn’ support it yet. But it will play in your Blu-ray player.
Gabe
One last thing.
You can author a Blu-ray video onto Blu-ray disc using Toast but you would need to buy a third party external Blu-ray disc recorder, apple do not make these yet.
Thanks GB – Very useful info
Any suggestions?
At present Im always on the look out for new effects/plugins that I can use in Final Cut, Motion, Livetype etc to put that wow factor in to my productions
Im a big fan of the Digital Juice software and have just spent hundreds of pounds on numerous titles – Swipes, Revealers, Motion Backgrounds, Fonts 4 ect not to mention a nice well made pop up green screen
Im also a fan of the Video Copilot (even though After Effects is taking me some time to master.) – Digital Heaven does have some nice plugins too.
Can anyone suggest any others?
Im a big fan of the reflective perspective effect but dont fancy paying 300 dollars for it.
The effect is actually called Perspective Reflection
Take a look
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy45rtt1Glo
Basically, it sucks that Apple didn’t even try. Nice one. Snow Leopard was a waste too.
Come on!
I am a little baffled by Apples lack of product in this arena in spite of all the apparently obvious reasons others have offered. What happens now it that other products that do not run on Mac OS get firmly intrenched and we’re once again faced with being the johnny-come-latelys. It gets very tiring and requires at least double the work with those that supervise the production line. At this production house we are the creators of the DVD Masters that are then either shipped out for glass mastering or for some other form of replication. As for error rates, I think this only applies if you’re actually burning the master on the computer, (internal or external). If you’re exporting .iso virtual disks or some other appropriate format for a duplicating house it is not an issue.