Sunday, September 19, 2010

Encore CS4 Will Not Burn BluRay

[update at end of post or simply go to my solution post here]
Blu-Ray error: “fatal error”, code: “6”, Note:”
This statement is the current bane of my existence.  It pops up just as an Encore BluRay project enters the “initializing burn” phase.

I just want to burn a BluRay so we can submit our film to smaller festivals and project in HD (BluRay) instead of SD (DVD).  I made a couple of really expensive coasters before at least realizing I could change the settings to render a BluRay .iso (rather than burning directly to media) so I’m not trashing an expensive BluRay disc every time I attempt to create a disc.
Adobe, in typical fashion, simply states that Encore does not fully support Vista and Windows 7 (Really? --in the year 2010 you don’t support the most commonly used OS on the planet?).  To further the issue, I am running 64-bit, so Adobe supports that “even less” if that’s possible.

I have found little to no information on this subject, and what little I did find did not work to solve my problem.  Still, I will list the “solutions” I found in my searches.  Perhaps they will work for you.

And if you have more information or know of a solution, by all means post your suggestions in the comments!

Via Creative Cow:
Download and install msxml 6.0
It should fix the error.
People report this as a fix, but it didn’t work for me.
From the same Creative Cow thread:
What finally worked was changing the disc name and the filename/location. I changed the name of the disc from "Smith-Jones Wedding Unedited HD Footage" to "disc" and the filename from "unedited_footage.iso" to "disc.iso" set to build to the root c: and I was able to build a Blu-ray ISO image.
I can see how removing spaces or shortening names could possibly help the issue (though, pretty lame that software in this day and age can’t accommodate spaces and long file names), but it didn’t work for me.

There is some information in this thread stating that bit rate spikes will prevent a project from burning correctly, but the solution seems to be a bunch of other software (and adhering to some extremely specific settings) to create the video and audio files before importing into Encore for burning.

For a little humor on the issue, this was one of my favorite threads during the search for a solution.  It’s just a bunch of people bitching about how ABYSMAL Encore is, most concurring that Adobe should be taken out behind the barn and shot in the head.
Some people have suggested that the “code 6” error is related to oversized menus (menus being too large), but I tried different menus and even removed my menus altogether (so that the BluRay was just the movie file), but still I got the exact same error.

UPDATE: I have since been able to burn a BluRay.  I’m not sure which of the many things I tried finally got me there, but I will tell you that I used Adobe Media Encoder to create MPEG2 BluRay (which Encore prefers) built upon the MPEG2 BluRay preset.  My audio is .ac3 (Dolby), and I used VBR 2 pass (not 1).  For some reason, these settings actually burn infinitely faster (2 hours vs. up to 43 hours previously), so I’m not really sure what’s going on.  All I know is that I can author BluRays with Encore now, so I’m happy.
The runtime for our film is 102 minutes, and the film alone is taking around 24.6 GB of space (my VBR is set to minimum 25, target 30, maximum 35).  A single layer BluRay will only accommodate 25GB, so I can only author a disc for projection purposes (adding menus and extras would exceed the disc capacity).
UPDATE: I know understand the secrets to the Universe, or at least authoring a BluRay in Adobe Encroe CS4.  Check the post here.

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