A 24.6 GB Blu-Ray Disc image that will not burn to a 25 GB BD-SL

[jmkoch]

I've got a 24.6 GB Blu-Ray disc image that will not burn to a 25 GB-SL-RE or a 25 GB-SL-R. I tried two separate RE discs. Studio returns a message that says "burn failure" and then "insert a blank or re-writeable disc." Any way around this? Using Studio or any other application, what is the largest disc image anyone has burned to a 25 GB BD-SL?

Many thanks for any advice.

Background:

I have successfully burned a number of high definition BD and AVCHD-DVD discs, using Pinnacle Studio 12.1 and a Sony Vaio FZ190 notebook that has 2.4 ghz core 2 duo, an NVIDIA GF 8400M GT card, and 4 GB RAM.

Some people burning to 4.7GB ordinary DVD media using Studio 12 observed that the actual disc use is less than what Studio's disk-o-meter forecasted. They manage to get more video on the discs than the ceiling the disk-o-meter alleges by means of choosing a 8.5GB DVD-DL as the target medium when burning the disc image. If the true image size turns out to be under 4.7GB, then they are able to select a DVD-SL as the target image, and burn to DVD-SL, when burning the discs. It would seem the same technique might work with BD discs, which are a shame to leave half-vacant, especially since they are so expensive.

I recently burned a disc image for a Blu-Ray based on a 165 minute timeline consisting of AVCHD clips, stills, mp3 music, background midi, titles, overlays, several nested menus, and some montages I'd whipped up separately using still clips and some motion shots converted to HDV. The disk-o-meter indicated that I would have to limit the bitrate to 19 mbps in order to fit the image to a 25 GB-SL BD. Later I managed to burn the image just fine. However, I noted that the image was only 16.9 GB, notwitstanding the disk-o-meters initial indication that the image would fill the disc with little to spare. Since BDs are darned expensive, I decided to expand the project by about another 80 minutes. Based on the experience of the initial image creation, and prior instances, I decided that the image size would be under 25 GB if I cut the bitrate to 16 mbps. I created the image by designating a 50GB-DL as the target medium and selecting "create image, but do not burn." The finished image turned out to be 24.6GB, presumably leaving 400MB (which seems like a lot) for any lead-in or other stuff required aside from the disc image itself, which I assumed would be a Goldilocks "just right" fit.

No such luck. I checked the "innards" of the disc image, and they look normal. At least the stream files correspond to the exact contents of the project and play back from the hard drive. But Studio failed to burn it to two separate 25 BD-SL-REs, one virgin and the other pre-used and erased, or to a virgin 25 GB BD-SL-R. In the case of the last disc, Studio began to "write lead-ins" and then issued a "fail" message and "insert blank or re-writeable disc." Is this my first de-luxe BD "coaster"?

Potential solutions:

1) Ask for help on the Blu-ray forum.

2) Burn the image over again, using a still lower bitrate, perhaps yielding a smaller 22 GB size, and find out if it burns to a 25 GB BD-SL. The drawback is that it takes over a full day to create such images, and to lower the bitrate may actually make the process take longer (greater compression) and cut image quality.

3) Spend >$40 for a 50 GB BD-DL and find out if that works. Drawback: those discs are presently far too expensive to make that an attractive option for the 25 copies I intend to mail to people who are the subject of the video, and I would be using only about half the supposed space on such discs.

4) Spend $100 for another application (perhaps Nero 9) and discover if it will burn the 24.6 GB image to a 25 GB BD-SL. It might or might not work. The free trial version of that product does not support BD. Might the purchased version of the project be buggy with large disc images anyway? Some postings I read suggest bizarre problems.

5) Assume that the 25 GB "available space" on a BD-SL is a myth, or that any project must leave an absurd 30% of disc space free.
Any comments welcome, please.

While facing this problem, I also discovered that the "available space" on a BD-SL seemed to fall from 25GB to 22.5GB, according to the right-click "properties" reading of Windows Explorer, after erasure of old content or re-formatting. Is it a fact that the usable space falls that much after only one use?