By Ken Stone

Burn high definition video onto standard DVD-R discs that playback in a Blu-ray player.

Blu-ray has been out for awhile now, but it has gotten off to a somewhat slow start. Burners and players are still expensive and the hardware has gone through a number of upgrades. Blank discs are costly and, until now, there has been no support from Apple for Blu-ray. For awhile now, we have been able to cobble together a Blu-ray system. Adobe Encore, found in the Adobe CS package, can author Blu-ray discs, Toast can burn Blu-ray and you can purchase an external Blu-ray burner for your Mac. For those who need to deliver Blu-ray to their customers this has been about the only way to go.

With the release of Final Cut Pro 7 things have changed. FCP 7 is now Blu-ray enabled and using the new 'Share' function we can create Blu-ray content and burn to an external (third party) Blu-ray burner. While the authoring abilities of Blu-ray in FCP 7 'Share' are very limited, only a 'Main menu' and 'Chapter Menu', early reports are the the process works and is stable.

The cost of external Blu-ray burners has come down, but they are still expensive, at around $350. [Note: Videoguys Pioneer BDR-203 Blu-ray burner with external housing $299]  So what, if like me , you are not yet ready to purchase a Blu-ray burner. It could be that you don't yet have the demand from your customers, you want to wait for the prices of burners and media to fall or you simply want things to settle down before you take the plunge. After all, you don't want to have to purchase Blu-ray hardware twice. At these prices, once is enough.  read more...