BluStreak Premaster Overview

BluStreak Premaster, $299 is a Macintosh application that creates the premastering folders and files required for replicating Blu-ray discs with mandatory AACS encryption. The output from any Blu-ray authoring application, on any platform, can be used as input. BluStreak Burner, $79 is the recordable media burning part of BluStreak Premaster, packaged separately.

The process is simple: In the authoring application, output a Blu-ray disc image or BDMV folder. In BluStreak Premaster, create a new job and choose the image or folder as its source. A job window is displayed, showing default values for the master disc volume name (taken from the source), the authoring studio (your company) and the author (you), which you may edit as you wish. The window also shows a list of the files in the order in which they will appear on the disc, plus some additional summary information about the source image or folder.

For dual-layer output, the files are placed in the appropriate layers with the layer break automatically chosen. Because Blu-ray playback is more tolerant than DVD to file and layer break locations, most projects should not require you to move the files, but if necessary you may drag files within or between layers, and the layer break will be adjusted as needed.

The final step is to export the content to a Blu-ray premastering folder in a hard disc location of your choosing. This folder may then be delivered to a replication facility for the mastering process.

A similar workflow allows you to create a new job directly from the output of any AVCHD camera, such as the Canon HF100. This job may be used as if it were created from a Blu-ray authoring system, to burn a recordable disc, or even to premaster. This workflow eliminates all re-encoding, but the resulting video and audio will play without menus.

Typically you would save a BluStreak Premaster job for possible re-use, since it contains the configuration used for export. This takes very little time and space, as the job contains a reference to the source content, not a copy of it.

BluStreak Premaster also burns directly to both single and dual-layer recordable media for playback in Blu-ray players, including BD-R, BD-RE, and the various flavors of DVD+R, +RW, -R and -RW. In addition, it can recover content from existing recorded disc media, provided that the content is not encrypted.