BD Author 3D

Blu-ray discs offer superior video and audio quality, thanks to their generous size that allows greater bitrates and higher resolutions. In order to create a Blu-ray movie from scratch, an authoring utility is needed to handle menus, chapters and the various subtitle files you may wish to add.

BD Author 3D is an application that enables you to create and edit every component of a Blu-ray movie, as well as compile them together in a professional package containing subtitles, multiple audio streams and interactive menus. The utility supports a wide variety of video formats, including M2V, 264 and MPG, as well as a multitude of audio files, such as AC3 or DTS.

All of these are categorized as assets and they can be added all at once under the same section, where they can be found when you need them. The clip editor enables you to make use of these assets and include them as primary audio streams, interactive menus or text captions.

After you add all the content you want to feature on the disc, BD Author 3D allows you to create movie clips containing them. These clips can then be included in customizable playlists, where you can also view a wide array of details about their properties, such as frame rate, duration and all of the included streams. You can add time marks from CSV files and chapters from plain text documents.

The created movie objects, menus and titles are all visible and customizable inside the BD schema section, where you can link them with each other and move them around in the desired order. The items are fully draggable and you can create an easy-to-follow schema to have a better overview over the included files and objects.

Despite the initially overwhelming user-interface, BD Author 3D is actually easy-to-use, as long as you familiar with all the terms and you have a bit of experience with authoring tools. As for the actual power delivered by the application, it offers all the features you might need to properly create and author a Blu-ray movie disc.