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Filed under: *VIDEO* •Audio •Distribution •

Toast 10 Titanium Pro package: a great upgrade

With version 10, Roxio (now a division of Sonic Solutions) offers a Pro bundle of Toast, which includes a total of 12 applications, most of which are multilingual. As many veteran Mac users know, the Toast application was born way before MacOS X (10.0). Back then, Toast was necessary to do something as simple as burning a CD, since before 10.0, the MacOS didn’t include onboard CD burning. Although CD and DVD burning capability is now part of the MacOS X (with much less depth than with Toast), the Toast application has grown quite a bit to cover many other tasks. Without even going into the bundled applications yet, you may know that Toast 10 can now burn data CDs, data DVDs, and data Blu-rays, and span data over more than one disk. Toast 10 can also do simple authoring of video DVDs and Blu-rays, as well as create “AVCHD disks”, which is HD material burned on a standard single or dual-layer DVD, and is playable on some Blu-ray players, and on the Sony PS3. But I’m only beginning to describe what the base Toast 10 application can do!

Data disks

Toast 10 Titanium can burn data on CDs, standard or dual-layer DVDs, and standard or dual-layer Blu-ray disks.

Audio disks

Toast 10 Titanium can easily create audio CDs, enhanced audio CDs, mixed mode CDs, music DVDs, or MP3 discs for use in a computer, home or car stereo, or set-top DVD player.

Regarding music DVDs, Roxio clarifies:

“A Music DVD can be played in a set-top DVD player or in a Macintosh or a Windows computer with a DVD player. A Music DVD should not be confused with a DVD-Audio disc. DVD-Audio discs require a special DVD player. A music DVD is a standard DVD that contains music (and can also contain photo slideshows and videos), has full navigation menus for song selection, and can be played in any set-top DVD player.”

Toast 10 Titanium even allows you to create a music DVD whose menu includes shuffle play and SmartLists.

Video disks

Roxio claims that Toast 10 Titanium Pro can create more types of video disks than any other single Mac application, and to my knowledge, that is a true statement. Those types include:

• Video CD (VCD)
• Super Video CD (SVCD)
• DVD-Video
• DVD-Video from existing VIDEO_TS folder(s)
• Blu-ray Video
• High Definition on DVD, aka “AVCHD” on DVD
• BDMV Folder

Toast 10 Titanium Pro allows you to create both authored or non-authored video disks. Either way, it offers the option to include auto-play or not. Don’t expect Toast 10 Titanium Pro’s authoring to include as much control as Adobe’s Encore or Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. However, Toast 10 Titanium Pro does include many menu styles for video disk authoring, both for 4:3 and 16:9. You have the option of either supplying Toast with pre-encoded DVD-compliant or BD-compliant video file(s), avoiding a re-encode… or having Toast encode it for you, either in MPEG2 or H.264 (the latter, only for HD video disks). I was happy to see that even in Automatic mode, Toast 10 Titanium Pro made logical decisions to make the closest Blu-ray compliant video when the original was not in a Blu-ray compliant framerate. For example, in Automatic mode, Toast 10 Titanium Pro converted an original 720p ProRes422(HQ) movie at 29.97p into a full-raster 720p at 59.94p to work within Blu-ray’s spec, since Blu-ray doesn’t support 29.97p directly. Toast 10 Titanium Pro acted similarly when I fed it 720p ProRes422(HQ) at 25p: it converted into 720p at 50p in order to fit into Blu-ray’s specs. I really like how Toast 10 Titanium Pro simplifies the process of creating video disks. However, I am the first to recognize that other HD delivery solutions are often more attractive, including AppleTV, WDTV and HD on the web. However, Toast 10 Titanium can also encode video for those destinations, as you will read a little later in this article. See Converting and encoding formats, two sections below.

Beyond just authoring and burning…

Toast 10 Titanium Pro can archive the footage you have on your SD(HC) chip from your AVCHD camera.

Beyond just authoring and burning, Toast 10’s base application can also:

• Archive AVCHD: Before you erase the SD(HC) chip from your AVCHD camera, you can archive onto one (or, when necessary) multiple optical disks (i.e. CD, DVD, or BD). Of course, Toast offers you the option to create more than one archive copy, just in case. Not only does Toast 10 automate this process, it can optionally also automatically create a low-quality reference movie and save it in the Movies folder on your Mac computer, as an reference to what you have archived on optical disk(s). When I say “low quality reference movie”, in my test with 720p AVCHD material, Toast reduced it from 1280x720 at approximately 20Mb/s to a 320x180 H.264 at approximately 828kb/s.
• Facilitate copying CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays, in much fewer human steps than is required with the MacOS X’s built-in capability.
• Convert audiobook CDs to be used on an iPod, iPhone, or other portable players, while retaining chapters.
• Convert and encode audio formats.
• Convert and encode video formats. (See next section.)

Converting and encoding video formats

Nowadays, we have plenty of simple and inexpensive (or even free) tools to convert and encode video formats. They vary in the user interface, available output códecs, presets, and batch capability. However, I must pause and clarify what I call front-end batch capability versus back-end batch capability. Some programs (i.e. MPEG Streamclip and QuickTime Pro) offer neither of the above. Others, like the now unavailable VisualHub (unless you already own it) and Toast 10 Titanium, offer front-end batch capability, but not back-end batch capability. That means that you can feed the program multiple video files of the same or different characteristics at the front-end, and then request encoded files of one specific type for all of the source files. For instance, suppose you have 5 videos you’ve edited or received, and you want to encode all five for one specific type of output, i.e. for the iPhone. Both VisualHub and Toast 10 Titanium can do that. That means that you can start the process, go out to lunch, and when you return, you’ll have the five videos ready. The good thing is that these programs don’t force you to babysit the computer while they encode all of the videos for you. However, if you wanted to encode all five videos for the iPhone, as well as for AppleTV, WDTV, and the web, neither VisualHub nor Toast 10 Titanium can do all that by itself while you’re out having lunch, since both VisualHub and Toast Titanium lack what I call back-end batch capability. For that, you need a more powerful tool, like one that I am going to cover in an upcoming article. Another feature present in VisualHub but missing in Toast 10 Titanium Pro is the ability to save your own encoding presets. But if you are okay with front-end batch processing only and manually setting your adjustments each time (especially if you are considering buying Toast 10 Titanium Pro for one or more of its other powerful features), then the converting and encoding features in Toast 10 Titanium Pro may serve you. However beware that Toast 10’s presets for Playstation 3 incorrectly use the m4v suffix. As long as you know the ideal specs for the target device, I recommend using Toast 10 Titanium Pro’s H.264 Player set for all H.264 devices (including iPhone, iPod, Playstation3, and WDTV, but excluding AppleTV) and entering the specs manually for the desired resolution, and bit rate. Set the frame rate to “current”. This will give you the universal MP4 extension for maximum compatibility, and avoid changing the framerate of the sources, even when they may vary among your source videos. Stay tuned for the upcoming articles about an inexpensive encoding tools with both front-end batch capability, back-end batch capability, and the capability to save your own presets.

Toast’s Size Indicator: an example of friendliness & intuitiveness

Toast’s Size indicator (shown in the bottom of the screen in almost all of Toast’s screens) is a great example of the program’s friendliness and intuitiveness. After you import or drag source material into the main windows and set the output format, the Size Indicator shows how much of a particular type of disk (or memory stick) of a given type will be used… or how many of them will be required when it won’t fit on a single disk. This helps you plan before you burn or even before you encode how much will fit in the desired target, be it a CD, CD-DL, DVD, DVD-DL, BD, or BD-DL. As you adjust your input content, encoding settings, and/or type of target disk, the Size Indicator changes dynamically. In the case of the audio or video file conversions, the Size Indicator shows how much will fit on a memory stick of either 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB. This is a wonderful feature. I just hope that soon Roxio will update the program to include 16GB and 32GB memory modules.

Toast 10 Titanium’s language localizations

Toast 10 Titanium is localized in seven languages: Castilian (the most widely used Spanish language, but certainly not the only one!), Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese. I found the Castilian localization to be almost perfect, except for these four issues:

1. The translator hired by Roxio/Sonic is obviously not a Mac user (or never uses MacOS in Castilian), because s/he mistakenly translated the word Finder as “Buscador”. If s/he used MacOS in Castilian, s/he would know that the word Finder has not been translated by Apple in localized operating systems, so it should never be translated in an application either, in order to achieve a consistent and seamless user experience. Roxio is not the only company to make this type of a mistake when localizing. About two years ago, Apple’s translator made the mistake of translating Ken Burns’ name in Apple’s Latin America and Spain websites… and also mistakenly translated Microsoft’s Exchange brand (which Microsoft never translated) as “Intercambio” in the Apple Mail application’s menu. After I pointed this out to Apple, they fortunately fixed both errors. Hopefully, Roxio will do the same.
2. Except for two words which are obviously Iberian (Ordenador and the accented version of Vídeo) as opposed to the Latin American versions (Computador/a and non-accented Video), the rest of the translation is quite generic Castilian and has my blessing! (With those two terms, a decision obviously had to be made, and no Latin American should be offended by Roxio’s choice.)
3. They neglected to translated the words Cancel, Pause and Media in at least one dialog.
4. A character encoding issue that existed under the Vídeo tab was fortunately corrected with Toast version 10.0.1. Updates are available on Roxio’s website.

Click here for the 12 bundled applications…

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Beware the **2.25 GB** download for all the ‘Pro’ extras!

Posted by Chrissand  on  03/13  at  01:31 PM

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Hello Chris Sand: The “Pro” extras were already on the installation DVD I received. I didn’t have to download them. Perhaps you had to download them, because perhaps you purchased the standard version and then upgraded online…

Allan Tépper

Posted by Allan Tépper  on  03/13  at  02:37 PM

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Yes, my comment refers only to the Download version - my ISP chokes me after about 750MB. :(
There is no warning I could see on the Roxio site about the size of the Download

Posted by Chrissand  on  03/13  at  02:41 PM

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Hello guys!

I want to subscribe to Online DVD Rentals, I want as many as possible each time. Which sites would you recommend…

    Thanks in advnce!

Mail DVD rentals

Posted by greek  on  09/21  at  02:58 AM

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Social networks and English song  forums have made it achievable to reach millions of people who take and interests in your style of English songs.

Posted by Methew Symonds  on  05/18  at  03:48 AM

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