Burning Multiple Discs in DVD Studio Pro

Today I was burning off a handful of copies of a DVD for a client when someone asked what I was doing since they "hadn't seen that before" in DVD Studio pro.

There are two basic ways to burn multiple copies of a DVD project in DVD Studio Pro.

1. If you only need to burn off a few copies, say less than 10, I usually get everything ready to burn and then hit Shift + Command + F to Burn a disc, test it then proceed if nothing goes wrong.

See, once you Burn off a test disc you've "Built" it, now all you need to do is "Format" it which really means burn off the Built project to a disc. There's no need to hit Burn again because that just rebuilds the disc and wastes time. So...after the initial test Build-n-Burn…

Hit Command + F for Format.

Pop in a blank disk.

Hit Return.

It's quicker than building each time and if there are only a handful of discs to burn - like I said, less than 10 it's not a bad way to go.

2. If you need to burn off many copies (but less than what a dedicated disc copier would be needed for) in DVD Studio Pro hit Command + F (this is after your test burn) and at the bottom of the Build/Format window change Output Device to Hard Drive and tell it where you'd like a disc image of your project saved.

Hit Okay.

After a bit you'll have a disc image of your project.

Launch Disk Utility or Toast and set it to multiple copies and that's about it.

Disk Utility and Invalid Content in Journal

Yesterday while switching around external hard drives to media manage some old projects that are going to be handed off forever (yay!) to a client I accidentally unplugged the wrong firewire cable and disconnected a drive that was mounted but not currently in use.

I don't think it was spinning at the time but I can't be sure. However, plugging it back in I found that it wouldn't mount. I tried a few times, tried using USB but it refused to mount. All the spin up, head alignment noises were there but it didn't mount.

Running Disk Utility showed an "Invalid content in journal" error. Now this wasn't a FCP drive, just a storage drive of mine. It's good practice to not journal your render drives (if you use an external one) for reasons such as this, speed, etc…

But this storage drive was journaled and apparently something went poof when its firewire was unceremoniously unplugged.

Running repair in Disk Utility showed:

The volume BLAHBLAH was repaired successfully.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Repair tool completed

But Disk Utility lied. Running Verify or Repair showed the same "Invalid Content in Journal" error every time. And it still refused to mount.

I decided to give Disk Warrior a go even though my version is out of date and after it's 10+ step process of rebuilding and replacing the directory the drive mounted.

Out of curiosity I rechecked it with Disk Utility and found no errors but I did notice that apparently Disk Warrior had turned off Journaling on the external drive.

Just to see what would happen I re-enabled Journaling through Disk Utility and re-ran Verify and again, no errors.

So if a drive won't mount, and you see the "Invalid Content in Journal" error in Disk Utility give Disk Warrior a try. Looking back I wonder if I could have just disabled Journaling on the un-mounted drive and then mounted it.

Dying Hard Drives Confuse Disk Utility

This post and this post describe some dying Hard Drives I ran across recently.

I found a screenshot I took while messing with one of the dead drives which is interesting and kinda funny:



After the drive failed to mount (and stopped screeching and clunking) I tried to mount it via a PATA-to-USB adaptor and saw the above. The funny thing to me is that the drive is actually 300GBs, not 2TBs. Maybe 2,199, 023, 255, 552 bytes is all the USB adapter can handle.

Ejecting Optical Media

If you try to burn an optical media disc and for some reason it fails (the Finder is notorious for this...stupid .DS_Store files...) and you then try to eject it and can't no matter how many times you hit the Eject key or try ejecting in Toast, try launching Disk Utility and highlighting the optical disc and hitting eject in the toolbar. Usually, the disc will pop right out.

(Btw, recently I had a DVD+r DL disc that failed to burn in the Finder but trying the next disc in the spindle worked fine with Toast. Grrr.)