Fit to Burn with Blu-Ray

[seattlemark]

Hello, I am trialing VideoStudio Pro X7 with Blu-Ray before I purchase it. One thing I need is for it to shrink the data to fit on a 25GB Blu-Ray. The Manual states:

"Click the Burn button to burn your movie file to a disc.
Note: If the movie is too big to fit onto a DVD, click Fit & Burn."

I have not been able to find this setting or button with Blu-Rays. Is it possible to get VideoStudio to automatically compress the data enough to fit on a 25GB Blu-Ray before I burn that disc. (i.e. Fit and Burn with Blu-Ray, rather than with just DVD.) If so, please describe how to do it with Blu-Rays.
(And if its possible to first do it to a Blu-Ray folder, before I burn the physical disc that would even be better. If so please also describe how to get that "Fit and Burn" to work with a Blu-Ray folder burned to the hard-drive first.)

[Ken Berry]

I have no idea if it is supposed to work with Blu-Rays, but I always give a strong warning against using Fit To Disk even for DVDs. Video Studio is simply not good at it. It works if the project you are trying to burn is just a little over the maximum size. So if you are trying to burn something to a 4.3 GB single layer DVD, and your project was 4.8 GB, then Fit to Disk might work -- though it would probably reduce the size (and thus also quality) to something like 3.5 GB rather than something much closer to 4.3 GB. But if your project was, say, 6 GB, then it would either not work or the results would be awful. So even if it was available for Blu-Ray, I suspect the results would be much the same.

The alternative would be to create a Blu-Ray folder (VS will not create a Blu-Ray ISO), and then use some other program to compress the size. I have to confess I have never tried this with a Blu-Ray folder myself, and so don't really know of a program which will do it, though Nero would be one obvious possibility since the guy who originally invented DVDShrink went to work for Nero. I understand DVDFab may also have a program which will compress Blu-Ray folders.

But the other possibility is to use Custom settings in VS to make sure the final project is less than 25 GB. And the most obvious way to do this is by lowering the bitrate, just as you would with Custom settings for a DVD. So if you are using AVCHD video for your Blu-Ray project with a bitrate of , say, 18 Mbps, then in Share > Custom, you would manually set a bitrate of, say, 16 Mbps (or lower). Again I would produce a Blu-Ray folder instead of burning an actual disk, just to check the final size. And if it were below 25 GB, then I would use a third party program like the freeware ImgBurn or Nero to burn the folder to disk.