Bugs in Toast 11 – fixed in Toast 20?

Okay, one more post (maybe).

There are so many things wrong with Toast's authoring abilities, I don't even know where to start. But, here's what I ran across today. All done in the Classic layout as Updated crashes 100% of the time during output.

1. No, the completed disk will not play multiple clips in succession. Each video goes back to the selection screen when it ends.
2. It re-encodes MP4 clips when building a Blu-ray disk because it will do that every time, regardless of your settings. Discovered that on another forum where that person asked Corel support why it does that. The rep said; MP2s? No, it won't re-encode those if they're built to the correct video specifications. MP4s? Yes, every time, even if they're the correct specifications.
3. I dropped two folders of smaller clips into a DVD test, and a 1920x1080 MP4. The output was set to 16:9. What did Toast 20 do on the output? It squeezed the 16:9 MP4 down in the width to 4:3 and added black bars on the sides to fill.
4. It automatically added a cross fade transition to one folder of clips, but not the other.

Toast is quite simply horrible at authoring. I never noticed how bad it was, since for video, I only used it to burn completed VIDEO_TS and BDMV folders saved out of Encore.

About the only use it has for me now with video disks is for DVDs. DaVinci Resolve will not produce an MP2. You export an Apple ProRes .mov file, and then convert that to MP2 with Handbrake or VLC. Per the Corel support person, Toast indeed did not re-encode the MP2.

Which comes back around to the previous post. Build and export your MP2 or MP4 completed sequences out of any other app, and bring those into Toast to create your disks. It's truly a frustrating waste of time trying to author your sequences in Toast.

But as I noted in the other topic, that's Corel. Acquire, ruin, abandon.

After doing very little testing, because it simply wasn't necessary to form an opinion, I can answer nearly all of those questions in very short order. And the basic answer is…

Don't try doing any sequence editing in Toast. It's clumsy and extremely limited. You can't add any transitions. You can't do any color grading. On and on. Use Premiere Pro, iMovie, DaVinci Resolve, or essentially anything else to build your clip, then export a finished MP4, (MP2 for DVD), or Apple ProRes .mov file, and bring however many of those you have into Toast.

I didn't bother with the Updated authoring since it bombs every single time I to output whatever I built, no matter how simple it was. Use Classic and drop your pre-built MP4 or MP2 sequences into the center pane one at a time. That will automatically create a separate menu box for each video.

For Premiere Pro, after you've finished building your sequence, you would (as I'm sure you know), drop the project file onto Media Encoder and output a completed MP4 or MP2. If you tried building your sequence in Toast, you'd have to wait for the final encoding anyway. You're just doing it ahead of time.

The only answer I don't have right now is what the completed disk will do if I bring in multiple sequences. Will they play straight through? Can you use the chapter buttons to move between them in each direction? Or will each one drop back to the menu screen when it's done playing?