BluRay Disc Capacity (the real story)

I just burned 4 BluRay coasters (and am now out of BluRays since you can’t purchase inkjet printable BR disks at ANY store on the planet).  Image Burn was telling me “Cannot Write Medium - Incompatible Format,” but I wasn’t really sure what that meant.  What it should have said was “that file’s too big, dummy.”

Even though Adobe Encore shows the capacity of a disc as 25GB (which is also what’s printed on a BluRay disc), a BluRay disc can ACTUALLY only hold a little over 23GB (sometimes even less).  If your Encore project says anything over 23 GB is being used (the big blue progress/capacity  bar under “Disc Info”), you’re write is going to fail.  Believe me.  Anything near that 25GB capacity isn’t going to work.

Heed this advice.  It will save you a lot of time, money, and wasted discs.

I usually burn a BluRay .iso rather than burning straight to disc.  I then use ImgBurn to burn my BluRay later.  It makes it easier to burn multiple copies, and often circumvents problems with Encore.   Encore will let you burn an .ISO image up to 25GB, even though that image will not REALLY fit on a (single layer) disc.

Now you know.

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Why in the Hell Don’t STORES Sell BluRay Media?!

I need to send out some BluRay media tomorrow.  I’m out of blank BluRays.  I drove to four stores.  NONE of them sell inkjet printable discs, two of them didn’t sell media AT ALL (Costco and Staples), Office Depot has only ONE (a shitty single-pack for $10), and Best Buy sells a 10-pack for almost $50.

WTF?!

I’m ordering more from Amazon right now, but I won’t get them for two days, and that’s two days too late.

Argh.

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Authoring BluRay in Adobe Encore CS4

For nearly a month I couldn’t create a BluRay in Adobe Encore CS4.  I tried all kinds of different export options for my media (H.264 vs. MPEG-2, different audio formats, different file sizes, different bit rates, VBR 2 pass vs. VBR single pass, etc.).  I tried changing the location of the files used in the project and the location to where the .iso was being written.  I tried shortening the name and removing spaces from all files involved.  I even sacrificed a live rooster under the full moon while chanting preset options.

None of it worked.

The answer to the problem is so simple it’s embarrassing… for Adobe.  If the thing that ABSOLUTELY prevents Encore from creating a disc/image is this simple to fix, why wouldn’t Adobe release a patch to fix it?

Here it is: the name of the disc, in other words, the name you give the disc in your project (not the .iso file, or the name of the project file, or the name of any of the other files involved), cannot be more than 15 letters, or the disc cannot be created.  You will get this error:

Blu-Ray error: “fatal error”, code: “6”, Note:”

I did come across this solution in my previous searches, but I didn’t understand that when people were referring to “disc name,” they didn’t mean the name of the file you were creating (the .iso image) or the name of the project.  Because it seemed like something as simple as the actual “name” couldn’t possibly have anything to do with an entire BluRay authoring session failing, I didn’t realize they meant the name you type in in this field:

If you make sure that the name in the “name” field above (where it says “Disc Name”) is short, your BluRay will burn.

Really?  FIX THIS (or at least document it), Adobe.

 

For what it’s worth, these are the settings I use when exporting my media from Premiere via Adobe Media Encoder:

MPEG-2 BluRay, 1920x1080, 23.976, VBR 2 pass, bit rate min: 25 – target: 30 – max: 35, Dolby AC3 audio at 320Kbps, “maximum render quality” ticked.

When creating a new Adobe Encore project, I select NTSC, 1920x1080, 23.976 (but oddly the Encore timeline still always shows 30 frames… can’t figure this out).

If you alter the length of the audio or video on the timeline, you are apt to receive other error messages that will prevent the project from rendering.  I advise making sure the audio/video are exactly as you want them in your Encore project before exporting them from Premiere.  I also am a fan of setting the Encore Chapter markers in Premiere.

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