Rivergate Software

The Final Cut Pro workflow used for this project is described in Adobe's PDF document which is attached to this page at the bottom.

David Courtice of DC-Creative in Santa Clarita has provided us with the following account of how he successfully authored and replicated a Blu-ray title with Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Encore, and BluStreak Premaster:

"This project was designed to mirror my client's DVD release. Menus and structure were exact as their DVD. No popup menus or advanced featured were required. Here is the disc structure:"

Main Menu:

Special Features:

Scenes p.1:

Scenes p.2:

Trailers:

"All of my assets were transcoded (mpeg2) through compressor, following a simple how to guide that I have attached to this account. The authoring was done with Encore CS4. This was my first time in Encore (DVD-SP is my choice tool for DVD). Once I familiarized my self with the interface the process of authoring was simple.

I was constantly waiting on the system, and felt it was way underpowered don't know if the program is heavy on system resources or if it is just slow in the way it does things.

The one thing that gave me the biggest headache and resulted in a less than satisfactory solution was a limitation within Encore. As you can see If you were to navigate to the Special Features page and wanted to activate an alternate audio stream, the common assumption would be that the user would: Select desired audio stream, ie. Commentary, at that point that track would activate and the menu would reload with resume feature hi-lighted.

This is where the problem comes into effect. Because BD spec allows "Menus" to have multiple audio streams, once the user activates a change stream button then is returned to a menu with only one audio stream the player defaults back to audio stream #1 instead of the selected audio stream. I opted to create duplicate "Menus" that each had a specific (Play Feature W/ Audio Stream 2) command. This still had its own drawbacks but was the best solution I could come up with.

The disc simulator in Encore is useless to say the least. So after several BD-RW Burn/QC's I had a Client approved HDMV.

The next step was to use BluStreak Premaster to create a Replicable BDCMF. BSPM is very quick & easy to use. With BluStreak it was as easy as "Export as BDCMF" and delivering the master to the replicator on a BD-R data disc."