BluStreak Tracer

BluStreak Tracer is a Mac application that helps you prepare Blu-ray content for “mastering,” or transfer to a master disc. This preparation process is known as “premastering.”

There are two approaches to disc mastering, depending on the number of disc copies you will need, and on the production processes and costs you are prepared to incur.

For small or non-commercial projects, you will likely choose to burn read-only (BD-R) or re-writable (BD-RE) disc blanks in a Blu-ray disc (BD) drive attached to your Mac. Depending on your drive’s capabilities, you can burn single- or double-layer discs, and you can repeat the burn operation to create multiple discs. Discs duplicated this way do not contain any content encryption.

You can also burn BD content to DVD disc blanks in a standard DVD drive, single- or double-layer, 8 cm or 12 cm discs, although the disc capacity is much less than a BD disc.

• Tracer allows you to customize your file layout, adjust the layer break if necessary, and edit the commands that implement the disc’s menus and other functionality.
• Tracer contains a simplified BD player which can show you the operation of your video, audio and interactive menu content.
• You can trace the player operation step by step, to diagnose and correct errors in the commands created by other applications earlier in the authoring process.
• Tracer burns discs to BD-R/RE media directly, and exports disc images (which can be mounted in the Finder) to hard disk.
• Tracer can burn and export discs and disc images containing both command-based menus and Java-based (BDJ) menus, but it cannot interpret the contents of BDJ files.
• Tracer also cannot encode content: video, audio and other elementary streams must have been prepared before the premastering process is begun.
• Tracer can recover content from existing discs and disc images, provided they are not encrypted.

BluStreak Tracer CMF

For large or commercial projects, you will likely send an image of your disc to a commercial replication facility, which will make a master disc for you, and then manufacture the number of copies you need. Because replication is expensive and sometimes difficult, extra premastering steps are required to ensure that the manufacturing process goes smoothly, especially for content encryption.

For such projects, you use an enhanced version of Tracer known as Tracer CMF. Tracer CMF contains all of the functionality listed above, plus the ability to export BDCMF folders (containing a disc image plus the additional support files required by a replication facility) to hard disk, and to burn BDCMF folders to BD-R/RE media.

Tracer Workflow

Tracer treats the content for each disc as a separate “job.” You create a new job by importing the content into Tracer, starting from one of the following sources:

• A top-level Mac folder created by an authoring application such as Adobe Encore. This folder corresponds to an entire disc, and contains a BDMV subfolder, a CERTIFICATE subfolder and may contain other subfolders needed on the final disc. Tracer imports all of the BDMV information except for non-interactive elementary streams, and maintains a reference to the top-level folder so that the streams can be located for playback and export.
• An ISO (UDF) disc volume image file containing BDMV and other folders. Tracer imports the same information as it does from Mac folders, and maintains a reference to the image file.
• (Available in Tracer CMF only) A BDCMF folder. BDCMF folders are created by Tracer’s export functions, or by the export functions of other applications you might have used in the past. Tracer requires that you “extract” a disc volume image file containing the disc content but discarding other information that was added during the BDCMF creation process.
• A Blu-ray disc. In this case, Tracer again requires that you extract an image file so that it can find the disc content without requiring you to keep the disc in the disc drive. Note that you cannot extract a disc image from a replicated (encrypted) disc.

Tracer allows you to import content that’s authored specifically for Blu-ray, as well as AVCHD content from video cameras and other similar sources. However, once imported, all content is treated as Blu-ray content — Tracer cannot currently export content in AVCHD format.

Once the import is complete, Tracer shows you the disc layout and content in a “job window.” Later sections describe in detail how to work with job windows. When you have prepared the job to your satisfaction, you can immediately export the job, in one of the following ways:

• You can burn the job directly to blank or rewritable media. This disc can be played in a hardware Blu-ray player as soon as burning is complete.
• You can create a disc image as a file on your hard disk. Image files are sometimes used as an interchange format between various software applications.
• (Available in Tracer CMF only) You can create a BDCMF folder on your hard disk.
• (Available in Tracer CMF only) You can burn a BDCMF folder directly to blank or rewritable media.

In the last two cases, the job’s content is embedded as a disc image within the BDCMF folder. This BDCMF folder can be sent to a replication facility.

As an alternative to exporting your job immediately, you can choose to save the job on your hard disk. Saving the job is often desirable, because it means you will not lose your file layout and other job parameters when you quit Tracer, in case you need to repeat the export later on.

What has changed since BluStreak Premaster?

BluStreak Tracer is based on an earlier application, BluStreak Premaster.

Although Tracer is a new product, for continuity with Premaster it has been introduced as version 2.

If you have used Premaster in the past, you’ll find Tracer to be very familiar, but with several major enhancements:

• The user interface has been streamlined. The various windows have been consolidated into a single tabbed window.
• The ability to edit and debug commands in titles and interactive menus has been added.
• There is a new content browser which lists all titles, movie objects, playlists, clips, pages, menus and commands in your projects.
• Tracer can now preview much of your content, using a new playback window that simulates the operation of a Bluray player.
• You can now choose and set layer breaks within transport stream files.