FCP doesnt share to blu-ray.

Hi All,

I am trying to help a friend out who has been a movie make for many many years but is not computer savvy. I personally know nothing about FCP X but I am good with computers in general.

Here is the problem and what I think may be happening but I am looking for a little help to see if there is a solution beyond what the workaround I came up with.

When I looked at FCP on his computer there were 4 or 5 projects open, some quite large. My friend would select a section of one of the sequences to "share" and then share it in the way he has always done to the blu-ray options. The export would start, file 1 of 2 then it would do file 2 of 2 and the information would change to "Processing" and there it would sit and never finish.

I tried simply closing the projects down and creating a short 2 minute sequence but with the same results.

I checked the HDD and the permissions and all was good.

It was only when I rebooted the Mac that we could get it to write the blu-ray disc's.

My theory is that the open projects somehow hogged all the memory leaving not enough for the processing of the data. I had checked the Activity Monitor and it all looked OK but I'm not sure how intensive the process is.

Also there is plenty of space on the HDD itself, almost 400gb. At least I assume that's a good amount.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

FCPX's DVD creation function is buggy. You could try trashing FCPX preference files (hold opt + cmd while launching app), or send it to Compressor and try the DVD creation there.

Are you writing it to the drive, or sending it directly to a DVD burner?

Memory is not an FCPX nor an OS X issue at this time.

A drive must have 10-15% of its capacity left as free space, plus whatever is needed for apps to export files the end user works with.

Thank you for that... I will try those options. I've heard people mentioning compressor before, what is it and how does it work? is it fairly self explanatory when you run it?

alternatively, what is the preferred method of burning a project to Blu-Ray?

and yes, it would do the export and then ask for a disc to be inserted to burn it too so I assume that means he is burning it directly.

Hi Stuart, Welcome to the forums.
Apple's support for Blu-ray Disks (BD) is not great or as Steve Jobs said "A world of hurt's".
That being said, I create BD projects all the time. Macs will natively burn BD via Disk Utility or you can use a program like Toast Titanium.
You don't really need Compressor, FCPX "Share" should be fine. Compressor can add lots of extra functions if you need to export to different formats but for simple BD's not needed. You can get it in the App Store if you want, $50.00USD.

I suggest that you create your BD file to the computer (desktop) instead of trying to directly burn it to a disk. This can really eliminate a lot of problems. Once there, then burn to disk. When you create BD to computer you create an img. file. This separates the creation of the export file from the actual burning.

If you use Toast you need to use the "Copy" tab instead of the "Video" tab.
For Disk Utility, you can just right click and "Burn" to a BD R/W capable drive.
None of Apple's drives are capable of burning a Blu-ray Disk. You need a third party device. I use an ASUS USB3 drive.

Hope this helps, Greg