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Edit Expertise: Test Drive: LaCie d2

Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

External Blu-ray Disc drive packs convenience and compatibility.

The arrival of Adobe Encore CS3 and its Blu-ray authoring capabilities will create a lot of interest in Blu-ray authoring. To produce Blu-ray Discs, of course, you'll need a recorder, and because Blu-ray recorders are new and rare creatures, we thought we'd take a look at the LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive ($839, direct). The category is very new, so I'll identify the questions you should ask when buying a Blu-ray recorder and then answer them using details from the LaCie drive.

About the hardware

Let's start by looking at the hardware. Your first question should always be, “Who's the drive manufacturer?” because very few vendors actually produce the drive mechanism itself. In the case of LaCie, it's a Matshita drive (short for Matsushita, the company that owns the Panasonic brand). In essence, this means that LaCie provides the case and bundled software, but the drive — which, to a great degree, determines both performance and compatibility — comes from Matshita.

Surprisingly, “single- or dual-layer” should be your next concern. Some of the early Blu-ray burners, including the Pioneer BDR-101A, produce only single-layer discs, or 25GB of data. While this is adequate for close to 2 hours of high-quality, high-definition video, it's definitely sub-optimal for data backups. At this point, there are plenty of good dual-layer drives available, so a single-layer solution is certainly less than ideal.

The next question for me is always, “Internal or external?” Like most video producers, I have multiple computers, both Mac and Windows, and I produce on both. Having an internal drive is doable, but an external drive, such as the LaCie, is much more convenient. I also like that the LaCie supports both FireWire and USB 2.0 connectors, which doubles my chances of being able to connect on the front of my desktop computers.

If you're buying a drive to serve as the single drive for a system, you'll want to know which formats the drive can record, although this is getting more uniform. For example, like most current Blu-ray drives, the LaCie can write to both BD-R and BD-RE at 2X speeds, and it is backward compatible with both DVD and CD. Note that while “1X” for CD-ROMs is 150KBps and “1X” for DVDs is 1.35MBps, “1X” for Blu-ray drives is 4.5MBps — which equates to 9MBps for a 2X drive.

In terms of performance, the LaCie drive can record to DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, and DVD+/-R DLat up to 8X speed — half the theoretical speed of the fastest 16X drives. Of course, I've never achieved more than 8X to 9X, even on drives rated at 16X. CD write speeds max out at 32X, a bit slower than the 48X maximum available. This is probably irrelevant to all but the most high-volume audio producers. Note that some older Blu-ray drives, such as the Pioneer BDR-101A, can't read or write CD media — a problem if you're attempting to configure a system with a single drive.

How's the authoring compatibility?

Once you've sorted out the hardware issues, it's time to turn your attention to software. For most producers, however, it's not the software that ships with the unit that's critical; it's whether the drive is compatible with their current disc-authoring solution. For the LaCie unit, the results were mixed, although they were mostly good.

On Windows, the drive worked perfectly with both Sonic DVDit Pro HD and Adobe Encore, and the drive is listed as compatible on the Adobe website. (Interestingly, Adobe lists the Pioneer BDR-101A as recommended on its website, but I heard from one of the company's system engineers that Encore had issues with the burner — and my tests yielded similar results.)

On the Mac, while Encore successfully wrote several small projects directly to the burner, it consistently failed to burn a 100-minute ballet program to Blu-ray. I tried burning both from the Encore project file and from an ISO file that I previously produced in Encore, with no joy. Fortunately, LaCie bundles Roxio Toast with the drive, and that burned the 23GB ISO file to disc in record time (45 minutes, 26 seconds) — producing the only 2X Blu-ray burn speeds I achieved in my tests.

Scanning the Web for comparable problems, I saw that several producers on Creative Cow experienced similar challenges with Encore and a Blu-ray drive from the FastMac Blu-ray Drive, which uses the same Matshita drive as LaCie. Conversely, I noticed that Adobe used the same Matshita drive in a Macintosh at its NAB booth and during subsequent road shows, obviously with good results. If you're using the Mac version of Encore and encounter problems writing directly to disc, try creating an ISO file and burning via Toast.

What's bundled?

Beyond producing Blu-ray video discs, Blu-ray burners can store up to 50GB of data on dual-layer Blu-ray Discs. Accordingly, your next question is, “What premastering software ships with the recorder?” As mentioned, LaCie ships Toast with the d2 drive, along with Easy Media Creator 8.2 for Windows. Both are excellent choices.

On the Windows side, the software looks and works identically to the Roxio software that's installed on most of my Windows systems — ignoring, of course, the increased storage capacity enabled by the drive. In my tests, the LaCie d2 Blu-ray Drive backed up 43.6GB of data in 3 hours, 14 minutes. I connected via USB 2.0 to an HP xw8400 workstation and burned Panasonic BR-RE (rewritable) media. This translates to about 3.75MBps, or less than 1X on a 2X-rated drive.

I tried both Verbatim and Ridata BD-R media, and both maxed out at about 0.97X. I checked other reviews, and I found that CNET achieved about the same recording times as I did. PC Magazine came close to 2X using software from Nero rather than the Roxio software, which wouldn't run on the team's test station.

For me, stability is more important than pure speed, and other than the problems I experienced with Encore on the Mac side, the LaCie drive produced no coasters in the process of burning to a mix of BD-R/RE media from four vendors: Verbatim, Ridata, Panasonic, and TDK. Given the problems that some legacy DVD drives experience with different media sources, that's pretty remarkable for a fairly new drive in an emerging market.

In addition, both Toast and Easy Media Creator can span data archives over multiple discs, simplifying the task of backing up projects larger than 50GB. Easy Media Creator also includes Backup MyPC, a simple archiving solution that can automate backups to Blu-ray and even hard drives. Other features include BDAV Blu-ray Disc creation, which is adequate for simple, menuless Blu-ray titles, and there's also BDAV playback via the bundled Roxio CinePlayer.

Toast is probably the most popular disc-burning utility on the Mac, and for good reason: It has a comprehensive feature set of music- and data-related features, and it's very simple to use. However, there are no video creation or playback features related specifically to Blu-ray.

Checking around, you'll be able to find cheaper, generic systems using the same Matshita drive, some of which include software, and some that don't. That said, LaCie packs a lot of software value into the bundle, particularly for cross-platform producers.

Blu-ray authoring

While “Blu-ray authoring” sounds wonderfully monolithic, there are seemingly more levels of Blu-ray functionality than options at a Chinese buffet — each with unique playback requirements. Anyone starting down the road of Blu-ray authoring needs to understand the landscape, so here's a quick tour.

At the pinnacle of both capabilities and playback compatibility are discs produced with products that support the entire BD-ROM (Blu-ray Disc Read Only Memory), such as Sonic Scenarist. These are titles that are mass-replicated, usually from Hollywood, with features such as Java support, pop-up menus, and interactive content with interactive graphics, usually falling into the HDMV (movie mode) specification. Because this is the mass market, all Blu-ray set-top boxes play HDMV discs.

The next level is BDMV (Blu-ray Disc movie), which are Blu-ray Discs with the functionality of DVD discs — menus, buttons, and the like — but Blu-ray content and disc capacity. This is the level of functionality provided by Adobe Encore CS3 and Sonic DVDit Pro HD.

From a design standpoint, the least functional level is BDAV (Blu-ray Disc audiovisual), which is provided by most consumer programs, such as Sonic Easy Media Creator, Ulead DVD MovieFactory, and CyberLink PowerProducer. BDAV discs don't have menus, and consumers play the video file via a file manager available in all Blu-ray players, rather than a custom menu created by the producer.

Just to complete the acronym invasion, BD-R discs are “recordable,” or write-once like DVD-R media, while BD-RE discs are rewritable like DVD-RW media.

Interestingly, as much as we all like a snazzy presentation, BDMV or even BDAV would be more than adequate for most video producers except for one major problem: Not all set-top players play BDMV, BDAV, or even BD-R or BD-RE. For example, my Samsung BD-P1000 played BDMV discs until a firmware upgrade in late 2006; I had to return to the older firmware to play the discs created by DVDit Pro HD or Encore. When Sony's BDP-S1 player shipped in November 2006, it wouldn't even play BD-R/RE discs until a June 2007 firmware update. The situation is improving, however.

Unfortunately, the producer class this hurts the most is the corporate- and event-type producing in BDMV or BDAV. Clearly, before buying a player, you need to make sure that it plays the discs and formats you'll be creating, and before agreeing to produce a Blu-ray Disc for a client, you need to understand where it will be played back to ensure compatibility.

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