The AVC Bluray preset in Compressor makes a .264 file. I've never seen that before. It's literally MyVideo.264

Is this what I want? I've been making .m2v files for the videos and AC3 files for the audio and they match the project settings, and when I go to build the Bluray for a .iso file, it even says they don't need to encode for any of my video files. I have three video files (menu video that loops, about 45 seconds long; a music video that's about 3 minutes long; raw footage of an event that's usually a little over 3 hours long), and maybe about 4-6 menu screens for chapter selections, and none of them have audio or playing video, just thumbnails of the chapters that are stills.

It's taking me about 12+ hours to create the Bluray .iso file. I have an i5 with 8GB RAM. is this right?

It doesn't seem right unless the video files are actually being recompressed.

Another thought - disk space. I believe a 25gb Blu-ray needs 50gb of free space to prepare and create the iso. Do you have plenty of disc space?

I've only burnt two nearly full 25gb Blu-ray discs and I cannot recall them taking more than a couple of hours.

Anyway last night I did a quick test. Three 7 min identical videos (Main Concept AVC, Main Concept M2V and Sony AVC) plus Sony Wav audio. Total 3.33 gb. Simple one page menu. Burning to iso with DVDA7 took 15 minutes. The video files didn't recompress but I forced the audio to recompress to AC3. Based on this time I would expect a full disc to take around two hours. But I only had a simple one page menu. I wonder if its something in your menus that is causing problems?

I've got the temp folder and the iso file being made to an external hard drive USB 3.0 that has about 2.5 TB's available on it.

I've tried making a AVC Bluray with .mp4 files and making a MPEG video with .m2v and .ac3 audio files. it has to compress the .mp4 files when I do that, but that part doesn't take very long. it doesn't have to compress the .m2v and .ac3 files. but they both still take forever, and I think it's the 'preparing compilation' part of making the blurry.

found out it's only when it's "Preparing Compilation - processing file 000003.m2ts" that it hangs up and freezes once it gets to zero on the count down. then it shoots up to 90 hours, then 120 hours, and then later ends up stopping with the following error..."Video buffer underflows"

My guess is the problem comes from using an external drive. I would suggest you try using an internal drive, at least as a test to rule that problem out.

I was worried that would be the problem :/ I bootcamped windows on my iMac and apparently didn’t give it enough space because it always ran out of space with the temp folder. So I’ve got it all going to an external. I’ve got the program also installed at my day job computer which had a lot of internal hard drive space. I’ll try it there tomorrow when I go in.

It just sucks because I’ve burned two Blu-ray exactly the same way and never had this issue. It did take about 12 hours but at least it would finish. This Blu-ray was due to a client on Friday of last week. This is driving me insane. I have another client due Friday this week. I put a support email to Magix on Monday last week. Have yet to get a response from them. You guys are the only ones helping, so thanks to everyone in these forums!

ok, seems to be working, but after a few tests, i think it's less of the files being on an external drive and more about being interlaced. When i export files that are compliant to DVDA, it'll tell me it doesn't need to be re-encoded. Gives it a green check. so i'm like 'awesome, sweet, this should burn pretty quick.' but the problem is that the files aren't interlaced. they're still progressive. so that's mostly on me, but a little bit on DVDA. If it's a progressive file, it shouldn't be telling me that the file doesn't need to be encoded.

I don't edit in interlaced footage. Everything i shoot is progressive (i shoot in 1080p60 or 1080p30). so if i go to export my file as interlaced .m2v files just so they're compliant for DVDA, it's going to take just about the same amount of time to do that in the exporting phase than it is to just have DVDA convert it itself.

I've still got some testing to do, but so far that's what I'm discovering. Basically just giving DVDA some .mp4 files right now and telling it to encode them to fit the disc and match the properties of the project. it's going to take me 16 hours because i've got about 3 and a half hours of 1080 footage that needs to be encoded. I could speed that up by giving it interlaced .m2v files, but it's going to take longer to export out of FCPX to make interlaced files anyway. So i don't see any quick way of doing any of this unless you're shooting and editing interlaced footage, or you're shooting all in 24p.

Again, i'll try and update this post as i do more tests.

I would still do it out of FCPX, otherwise you are encoding it twice. Once to create the file for DVDA and then DVDA is re-encoding. If you give it the correct file in the first place, you save quality.

What exactly should I give it though? What extension? Like .m4v? Or what? It seems like when I find the right format everyone says I should use, I find out that Compressor doesn’t let me make it Interlaced and then I’m out of luck. I want to make it an AVC Blu-ray, not an MPEG-2 Blu-ray