Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. Guess I’ve gotten in a rut or something.
Anyways, some of the stories I didn’t mention at CES was all the 3D excitement about new players and the PS3’s ability to have a firmware upgrade to support 3D. What does that all mean for us menu designers/encoders/authors? [...]

I found this on LinkedIn, and it’s pretty cool if you have an iPhone. I’ve never been real good at bit budgets so this is a great tool to have handy. Best of all, it’s free! And it works for DVD or Blu-ray. Here’s what the creator, Andy Evans from The Pavement in London, had [...]

Apple released Final Cut Studio 3 today and added the ability to burn Blu-ray discs directly from the application, but I have a feeling you still wont be able to actually play it on your Mac. But, I welcome this change and love that if you are an editor you won’t have to go to [...]

Sonic just sent out the email, 5.1 is ready to download from their support site. They’ve added a bunch of interesting features to Designer 2.6, which are now supported in BD 5.1 which make authoring easier. Essentially, you can start authoring from the Photoshop phase. We haven’t done much with it because I like to [...]

DVDAfterEdit has released their premastering application for the Mac called BluStreak Premaster. I’ve played around with it a little bit and it’s a nice little program. They describe the app as:
“BluStreak Premaster is a Macintosh application that creates the premastering folders and files required for replicating Blu-ray discs with mandatory AACS encryption. The output from [...]

Sonic has come out with a new version of Designer. Here’s what they say is new:

What’s new in Scenarist Designer PS 2.6?

Faster Export Processing – Exporting your designs is now faster than ever. Version 2.6 saves huge amounts of time by enabling users to choose their export format(s) before they optimize their designs. For example, [...]

NetBlender has released version 1.7 of DoStudio. New features include BD-50 discs and Managed Copy. They’ve also announced that they’ve shipped over 200 titles. Pretty impressive. Check it out here.

Sonic has released a new version of their software. Here is a list of what’s new:

Multi-angle Clip Handling – Version 5.0.2 features full support for the use of multi-angle Clips in multiple PlayItems.
PlayItem Seamless Connection Limit Enhancements – It is now possible to seamlessly connect an unlimited number of PlayItems to Arrival Time Clock (ATC) [...]

Scott from 22 Grey Street made a nice little web app that will convert your Scenarist subtitles to DoStudio subtitles. If you didn’t know, Scenarist subtitles are nothing more than an XML file with a PNG for each subtitle. Well this little program takes the XML (which is the BDN file) and converts it for [...]

I got around to playing with CS4 a little bit and did a quick test and am pleased to find out Sonic Designer seems to be working ok on OS X. I’m not sure about Windows yet. I ran through all the scripts I use and they all work. There are a couple things I [...]

I just got the email from Sonic that Scenarist 5 is released. Here is what is listed to be new from the emai:

What’s new in version 5?

Scenarist Exclusive: BD-Live Project Management Support - Scenarist 5 has a new project management architecture designed to more efficiently enable BD-Live title development. With Scenarist 5 you can create projects that [...]

If you are like me you ditched your HD-DVD player and sold your movies on eBay back in February. But maybe you are starting to regret it just a little. Well sellout.woot.com has a HD-DVD player with 2 movies for $50 if you feel like ditching the Blu and getting back with the red.
Not that [...]

I updated the Blu-ray HDMV Flash Viewer to version .15. Mostly I added some options in the control panel thing to make it easier to send menus to clients. Here’s the changelog from the help file(which needs some updating in sections):
Version .15 – Added options into the control panel so you don’t have to mess [...]

I mentioned a press release a few days ago where Sonic mentioned some new EDGe products. Well, I somehow missed several other press releases announing other new things. They can be found here:
Sonic Powers BD-Live With New Scenarist
Sonic Debuts Scenarist BD Studio Workgroup
Sonic EDGe Debuts Key BD Revisioning Solution with BD Reauthor
Sonic Dramatically Streamlines BD-J [...]

Sonic has released a new software package called Scenarist QC 1.0. It’s currently in Beta form, so you know what that means.
It’s built off of CinePlayer but has a few features other players don’t have. The readme says it can create “watches” for BD-J code and has a full debugging environment that logs all sorts [...]