Compressor Tips: Converting Video for Blu-ray Disc Authoring

Compressor Tips: Converting Video for Blu-ray Disc Authoring
Page content

Attack of the Future

Blu-ray is coming in to be the high definition replacement to conventional DVD faster than most people can prepare. While many people are still working with more traditional formats and digital files the technology is transitioning, effectively sending many past projects toward an obsolete graveyard. This affects every part of the post-production workflow, from the video editing software to the DVD authoring program. One of the biggest questions is how to use your video conversion or compressing software to create a MPEG-2 file that will be safe for Blu-ray disc burning in high end DVD authoring software. Apple’s Compressor still leads the pack as one of the best video conversion programs, and in this realm it still stands alone.

The Process

To begin this process you have to open your file in Compressor or export to it in the same way that you would for any other type of compression. This includes setting the appropriate target and naming the files specifically. You may want to include that these compression files are specifically for Blu-ray disc authoring. Select MPEG-2 in your Inspector, but you need to make a specific change from the default settings. Go to the Stream Usage pull down menu and then select Blu-ray instead of the SD DVD or Generic setting that it might be on already. From here you just go ahead and submit the batch as you would anyway, making sure that both video and audio tracks are available.

After Compression

From here the most important thing is that you take the file outputted by Compressor and then import it into a DVD authoring program that supports quality Blu-ray disc authoring. One of the best of these is going to be Adobe Encore, not only because of its support of Blu-ray disc authoring but also because of its ease of integration into any workflow model and the series of powerful tools. This is how you are able to convert your common post-production process into one that models professional production houses and video editors. If you do not have DVD authoring software that does not support Blu-ray then there is not point in using Compressor to convert files for Blu-ray disc authoring.

This post is part of the series: Special Apple Compressor Situations

Here are Apple Compressor tutorials with unique situations or very specific uses of the software.

  1. Apple Compressor Tutorial: Compressing Photo JPEGs
  2. Compressor Tutorial: Compressing for Blu-Ray
  3. Compressor Tutorial: Compressing Multiple Files at Once
  4. Tips for Using Compressor for Internet Publication
  5. Compressor Tips: Converting Video for Blu-ray Disc Authoring