Re: video delivery alternatives

OK a couple of years ago I began doing Blurays, blew dvds out of the water, never went back to doing them. My HD footage looks dreamy on Blurays. So now I'm finding that most of my cclients have 'smart' TVs or Playstations which play everything, including MKVs. So why torture myself fiddling with Encore and a hit and miss disc process. ( it almost always works but it still craps out sometimes ).
So the plan is to deliver a finished product as a HD file. But for simple aesthetic reasons I cannot bring myself to give my clients a file on a thumbdrive. I was thinking, if I burned the file on a disc, I could still give them a packaged final product, a printed disc in a DVD case with printed artwork. So it all still looks like an up=market product.
here's my question, how can I produce a simple DVD (and I don't mean the playable standard DVD) which when installed pops up a graphical interface that allows the client to navigate to the relevant media through video or still images acting as aliases which activate the media files. . As opposed to a media DVD which just reveals folders or file thumbnails.
Hope I've been clear.

Well, you can't. What if they put it in a Windows computer? Or a Mac? With Mac you can make the disc look kinda fancy when you open it like a lot of installers/DMG files do. But that same disc can't be made to do that on a Windows computer. Certainly not a PlayStation 3 or 4 or Xbox One. In fact the game console won't see the disc as a medium to play back the file at all. A Blu-ray is the only way to be sure it'll work on everything (assuming people actually have a BD-ROM drive hooked up to their computer). Otherwise a DVD with an MP4 file would be your best bet. It can't be fancy, just a folder. Just make sure it doesn't contain any of those annoying Mac dot_files. Windows people will wonder if they're meant to be there, what they're for, etc etc. They don't need to know that's how we Mac users spy on them.

Thanks Joe. I'll do a Bluray and a file on a DVD and have a look at how it performs. I'm interested in a quality comparison between the Bluray H264 and the mp4

Ok I just did a H264. of a current project, about 12 GB reduced to 1.8 at the highest setting possible using streamclip ( has consistently given me much better encodes than compressor). Burned it on a data dvd, shoved it into the playstation and BINGO. Quality is jaw dropping compared to dvd discs. Even sitting two feet away from it the detail is brilliant, no jerky playback at all. Only one grumble, I can hear the playstation mechanism crunching away as it reads the disc, it's not too bad but it is noticable. Can't remember noticing that before when it was playing regular discs. But this is a really convenient result. Simply encode the footage and I can still present it on a printed disc and the quality is awesome.

It worked in a PlayStation as a data disc? Color me surprised! Yeah MPEG Streamclip is much better than Compressor at making h.264 MP4 stuff I find. But Compressor is king for making .264 files for Blu-ray. Never let Encore encode anything itself. You could also burn AVCHD (which is still .264) onto a regular DVD directly from Final Cut with a very limited menu and you shouldn't hear it do any searching back and forth as it plays.

Never thought of going to AVCHD from FCP, I'll give that a go. Streamclip is what I've been using for my bluray h264s Joe. I did try mpegs but had error codes etc and archived encore support suggested h264 instead. I was very glad I had encore a few years ago, but clients rarely ever asked me for blurays. It can be very frustrating though. You can set up a project, burn it, play it, looks and plays great. burn a second one from the same project and for no particular reason there's a error code. It's done that to me about 20% of the time. Failed discs, half burned projects. But onwards and upwards.

Interesting. What I do is create an ISO. Then I burn in Toast from that ISO at the slowest speed. Good enough for replication. Sometimes I get a weird error (can't remember which error # it is). But basically it's having a hard time deciding where the layer break needs to be. In instances like that I export as a Blu-ray folder, take it over to Windows which I have running virtually on the same machine and use ImgBurn (free) to create a proper ISO. Then burn it with Toast. Again, good enough for replication.

Today I'm doing two projects, one 20 minutes long and the other 1hr 40. The 20 minute job took about 2 hrs to encode to h264. And that fitted on a dvd easily and as I described i just burned a data dvd. The other one so far is still encoding at about 10 hours YIKES. Streamclip does do several passes, but JEESH 10 hours. Have to factor that in. But it looks like longer projects will definitely have to be blurays, this one sounds like it's going to be over 10gb, so won't even fit on a dual layer dvd and flash drives all are limited to 4GB file sizes for a single file. Ah well, back to tickling encore. Yes, as you said, I found archived support advice that recomended editing in encore but burning in toast, that's what I do too.

You can reformat the flash drives as exFAT using Disk Utility. That gets around the 4GB limit but older Windows machines (pre Windows 7 I believe) probably won't recognize the disk.

Tried that Joe but playstations only recognize fat32. Yes you can set up a PMS ( playstation media server ) on your mac and the playstation will play everything your mac is capable of playing by streaming it from the mac but that's OK for me at home but it's got to be idiot proof for clients. I think I might look around for a hardware encoder. I typically export my finished project to QT using current settings, pro res, so I always have a full quality archived source. So i'm wondering what there is available that wil ingest those files and encode h264, any ideas ?
Been trawling. seems the pci card options for a mac are very limited ( only found one and it's Leopard only ) and very expensive SO.
I also have a ninja which I use to shoot straight from the camera in prores. The ninja has hdmi 'in' and 'out'. I can simply drop my finished qt prores files onto the ninja Hard Drive and connect it to an external decoder that has HDMI in but is there such a decoder ?

OK looks like the matrox compresshd card is the only real contender. But it's about $400, in my hood it's £429-00. That's a flipping serious price.

Well, there is also the Elgato Game Capture HD60. Don't get the 60S because that uses your GPU for the encode (but will also allow for a higher bitrate). It encodes to h.264 in real time and the results certainly aren't horrible.

thanks Joe I'll have a look at that.

I have it and it works well. I had issues with their latest software and they sent me a fixed version of it in a few days after asking questions. Their tech support is getting really good.

Joe I'm very interested in this. But I've seen a few posts and reviews that are critical of the video quality of the elgatos h264. Falls down on transitions, gradients, text, blacks arent clean or smooth, what is your material and what is it being presented on. I'm doing some corporate, nature, community and also weddings. I've just done the best wedding ever, she is a knockout, the flowers, the church was like out of a fairy tale, great stained glass etc. So loads of opportunity for beautiful detail. My camera does a super job when I have the focus nailed and when presented on a 1080 hd tv the footage is superb. When it's dumbed down to dvd it's crap but my blurays are superb esp with close-up nature footage. Streamclip, although excrutiatingly slow, produces flawless h264s, perfect for quickies but not for someone who needs to crank out projects in next to real time.
can the elgato footage be tweaked in preferences etc give the same demanding quality ? What's your view on this.
I've spotted three matrox cards but they're all in the US. I missed one in canada, a relative would have got it and posted it for me but I wasn't quick enough.

LOL thanks Joe, my grandson loves your channel, he's in to all that. I've never played a 'game' on computer, i just sit patiently mirroring his ipad and recording his footage for his youtube channel. As you say, loads of challenging action scenes. And again, everything I've had to shoot so far has allowed me to dial in everything at a sedate 25fps, with nailed wb, nailed focus, no sudden bursts of speed; I've been spoiled. Your game footage is hectic and for my critical eye it would be hard to make a review of the elgato based on that if I was intending to use it to encode 1080 footage. It can certainly handle high fps but the animation doesn't really tell you how well it handles natural footage at 1080. I'm still trawling but the matrox is looking better and better even if it's long in the tooth and costs an arm and a leg.
BTW I figured you for 20 years older :-) Many thanks for your input and my grandson says your channel is awesome.

Ha ha thanks. PS - I am old. :)

Also, I am always looking to upgrade any video components I have. I am going to take a look at the matrox compresshd.

well there's one going cheap on ebay in NY. If I had a pal in NY I'd snap it up ! Don't have a link to hand but do a search on ebay.

Hey Joe, a wee heads up. I just got a Matrox Mini with max ( google it ) second hand on ebay. IT'S DOING MY BLURAY ENCODES IN REALTIME. Indistinguishable from the best that compressor does on its own. When matrox software is installed, it instals presets in compressor for the matrox encoder and VOILA, it's that simple. The matrox blazes through it and activity monitor shows barely a glimmer of processor usage. Happy days.