Toast Pro DVD Authoring
29 01, 11 Filed in: Video Production | Macintosh Software
Its been a love-hate relationship with Roxio's Toast but since there is little else to use on Macintosh, I wanted to share my observations on making it work - by David R. Beebe
Toast Pro DVD Authoring
Written by Elgato and sold by Roxio, Toast 10 allows the creation of up to 20 minutes of Blu-Ray compatible video to be written to a standard DVD. Important Note: Video from FCE only works with Toast 10.01 or 10.02. Versions 10.04 and 10.06 kick off a source material error, -18771 but the later versions support chapter marks. One suggestion is to use 10.02 to encode then stop the process saving the working files. Move them into a later version which will skip the encode and begin at the disk multiplexing step.
Before testing HD video, I had already switched to Toast from iDVD since iDVD could not author a DVD with less than 90 minutes worth of compression. Most of my projects were in the 45 minute range which left a lot of unused space on the disc. Toast can compress for a 60 minute SD project and the results were much better. I did discover that writing the project to a disc image rather than to an actual disc added an audio drop at 25 minutes that was not there if writing to a disc and then reading it and saving to a disc image.
Testing Toast 11 Pro now.
Blu-Ray Video
Menu Style: Passport 16x9 (change button highlight color from default Yellow to Gray), Aspect ratio Widescreen
Encoding: Auto Best or Custom - Video Format MPEG-4 AVC, max Average and Maximum data bit rates to 26.0 Mbps, Motion Estimation Best (checking Half-PEL also helps but slows down processing), Re-encoding (set to Automatic but is it ready as-is and should be none - Toast seems to ignore this option), Field Dominance (set to Automatic but should it be progressive? Source is not.)
Record to disc then mount it and make a disc image from it to save. This works better for audio than saving to disc directly from the encoded files that Toast created.
Converting to SD
The same 16:9 QT video from FCE works nicely as input to Toast for a widescreen SD DVD. There is no need to export a different source file from FCE.
Written by Elgato and sold by Roxio, Toast 10 allows the creation of up to 20 minutes of Blu-Ray compatible video to be written to a standard DVD. Important Note: Video from FCE only works with Toast 10.01 or 10.02. Versions 10.04 and 10.06 kick off a source material error, -18771 but the later versions support chapter marks. One suggestion is to use 10.02 to encode then stop the process saving the working files. Move them into a later version which will skip the encode and begin at the disk multiplexing step.
Before testing HD video, I had already switched to Toast from iDVD since iDVD could not author a DVD with less than 90 minutes worth of compression. Most of my projects were in the 45 minute range which left a lot of unused space on the disc. Toast can compress for a 60 minute SD project and the results were much better. I did discover that writing the project to a disc image rather than to an actual disc added an audio drop at 25 minutes that was not there if writing to a disc and then reading it and saving to a disc image.
Testing Toast 11 Pro now.
Blu-Ray Video
Menu Style: Passport 16x9 (change button highlight color from default Yellow to Gray), Aspect ratio Widescreen
Encoding: Auto Best or Custom - Video Format MPEG-4 AVC, max Average and Maximum data bit rates to 26.0 Mbps, Motion Estimation Best (checking Half-PEL also helps but slows down processing), Re-encoding (set to Automatic but is it ready as-is and should be none - Toast seems to ignore this option), Field Dominance (set to Automatic but should it be progressive? Source is not.)
Record to disc then mount it and make a disc image from it to save. This works better for audio than saving to disc directly from the encoded files that Toast created.
Converting to SD
The same 16:9 QT video from FCE works nicely as input to Toast for a widescreen SD DVD. There is no need to export a different source file from FCE.