[ This article was first published in the April, 2009, issue of
Larry’s Final Cut Pro Newsletter. Click here to subscribe. ]
Markus Wernig sent this in:
I was inspired by your great Buzz Podcast on Blu-ray discs which you mentioned in your last newsletter. In that edition of The Buzz, Bruce said that with Toast 10 you can burn a short Blu-ray project onto a traditional DVD-R. He also mentioned a “Toast Blu-ray tutorial” that he put up on Ken Stone’s site: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/taming_the_wild_blu_2.html
I have a question that no one has been able to answer yet. I managed to burn a Toast Blu-ray-DVD-R but the menu that I picked didn’t work at all. The screen just stays dark when I put the Blu-ray-DVD-R into my Blu-ray player. The only way I can get the Blu-ray movie to play is if turn on the auto-play option in Toast. When the movie is done playing, the screen goes black. No menu. If I want to play the movie again, I have to eject the disc and put it back in.
Bruce’s tutorial makes it sound like the Blu-ray menus should work with regular DVD-Rs. Maybe someone can point me in the right direction.
Larry replies: Currently, Blu-ray burning is a moving target. We should see some changes on this at NAB this year. However, I sent your questions over to my favorite Blu-ray expert – Bruce Nazarian – and he graciously sent me the following:
There are still a few glitches in the Toast world… I’ve encountered the bug where clicking the Menu button returns to a menu that is a black screen, with no BG image. I’ve reported this to Roxio and they’re actively trying to solve it… seems it’s only on some players, not others… there’s no consistency in which Toast version or Mac OS triggers it, either… My experience has been that even if the menu is black, clicking the enter button should activate the button, and restart the movie. But the missing menu is a HUGE bug – and I’ve told Roxio about this.
Also, this might be a similar issue what Markus reported, where the auto-loop function misfires, and loops a small section of the end of the film before it returns to the beginning of the movie. I suspect they have a few bugs yet remaining in Toast 10. the Roxio forum is a good place to track the bug progress, or report it.
The most recent Toast update – Toast 10 – seems to have fixed the loop bug, as the movie will now play and loop properly. However, the “menu doesn’t show, only button highlight appears” bug still exists – Roxio have taken steps to investigate and finally squash this bug, but I can’t say how long this will take.
By the way, Larry, in addition to my written tutorials on Ken Stone, I’ve been adding some new video tutorials on Recipe4DVD.com, in the Learn menu: “Learn Toast”, and have begun a subscription newsletter series on Blu-ray, as well as updating issues on my Digital Guy blog. www.recipe4dvd.com/blog.
Larry adds: By the way, Bruce tells me that he will be making a MAJOR Blu-ray announcement at the Final Cut Pro SuperMeet at NAB in April. As soon as I can report it, I will.
