I'm a Mac and I need PC help

March 23, 2010 10:44 AM

How to transfer video from a Mac and burn on a Blu-Ray PC?

I produce an annual video/photo chronicle of my high school band's events throughout the year. I import HD video and use iMovie in 1080(i/p) mode to create the work. I then import everything into iDVD and burn a standard definition DVD.

This year, I'd like to use a friends new Dell XPS Studio with Blu-Ray Burner and create (at least for myself) an HD version that retains the resolution of the iMovie file.

His software is Roxio Creator. I would need information as to what file type to output the iMovie and how to get everything "just right."

Thanks and I'll take my answer off the air.

posted by bach to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

MultiAVCHD will do everything for you, including making custom menus. Given the chance, I'd feed it only with 1080p24/23.976 or 720p60/30/24/23.976 because I feel more comfortable messing around with Avisynth myself than allowing an app to do it blindly. But MultiAVCHD will take pretty much anything you can throw at it and won't transcode unless necessary. It also won't upscale any SD stuff except to BD-compliant 480i/p if it isn't there already, so it will pass on that task to playback devices (generally the best strategy unless you have a specific reason for pre-upscaling).

I would skip Roxio Creator and iMovie entirely and just work directly on files coped from the camera so you transcode at most once. Obviously if you're doing any great amount of editing other than splitting and combining clips/titles (which you can do in MultiAVCHD) this won't work for those segments.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 10:53 AM on March 23, 2010 [2 favorites]

Also, FWIW, I like IMGBurn for BD-R image making and burning.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 10:54 AM on March 23, 2010

The most widely-used and easily-transferred HD file format standard is Matroska (.mkv). However, I don't think Roxio Creator actually supports Matroska files; the formats that they list as supporting (MPEG-2, etc) are not HD-quality container formats, so it would be sort of pointless to use them.

This confuses me, to be honest. I don't really know what the deal is.
posted by koeselitz at 11:00 AM on March 23, 2010