Phantom Drive and Virtual Disk: Do I Misunderstand?

[George Tyndall]

I downloaded the demo version of the Phantom Drive thinking it was going to allow me to burn my m2t Timeline to folder for later use in producing Blu-ray disks, however, it turns out that what the drive does is to burn a "virtual disk." It does not offer the option of burning to folder.

The documentation states:

When the burning operation has been completed, insert the new virtual CD or virtual DVD
in the drive to test the results. If you are happy with the result, you can burn it to a disc. If
not, you can go back to Step 1, make the necessary changes, and repeat the virtual burning
operation.

However, I do not see that the Phantom Drive offers the option of imaging the virtual disk to a real one. What is meant, apparently, is that if one is happy with the result one may then start from the beginning the disk-burning process, using his real disk drive and software, to burn a real disk.

Unless I am misunderstanding something in the documentation, the purpose of this software is merely to allow one to visualize a virtual disk prior to burning a real disk in one'e hardware disk burner; in other words, one gets to see a preview of how a disk will look without using up, and possibly discarding, a real one.

To repeat, once the virtual disk has been created, I don't see any way to create a mirror image of it for subsequent use: It is a .phi file which my disk-player software recognizes for the purpose of playback, however, my disk-imaging software does not recognize the file.

Am I misunderstanding something?

[RJ Johnston]

I think you might not have selected the .ISO option in Phantom Drive. Then you can use ImageBurn to burn the .ISO file. Or you can mount the .ISO file with Phantom Drive and copy whatever you want off it.

[George Tyndall]

I think you might not have selected the .ISO option in Phantom Drive. Then you can use ImageBurn to burn the .ISO file. Or you can mount the .ISO file with Phantom Drive and copy whatever you want off it.

Thanks for the reply, RJ. You are exactly correct. I thought I read that the ISO option is for data disks rather than video disks, so I did not use it.

Regarding "Or you can mount the .ISO file with Phantom Drive and copy whatever you want off it," can you be more specific on how to do that?

Also, I read here on muvipix that ImgBurn can be used to operate more than one drive at once, including Blu-ray. Do you know about that?

[RJ Johnston]

While taking a break, it dawned on me that you don't need to use the ISO option. But I have used it to create DVD-Video discs and they do play back in my Sony DVD player. The Sony DVD player requires the disc to be a DVD-Video disc and not just a data disc. I do not have a Blu-ray burner or player to try these things out on. Hopefully someone is willing to waste a couple Blu-ray discs. If there's a Blu-ray rewriteable disc, then that's what I would use to try this out. So in the following, I did a DVD-Video disc.

After you have burned a Phantom disc in Premiere Elements, it will be ejected. The next thing to do is to insert it again. I do that by using the "Insert..." menu item and specifying the .phi file as the source (if I don't use the ISO option) or by specifying the .ISO file as the source (if I use the ISO option). I usually right-click on the Phantom Drive icon down in the tray, and select the Insert item from the pop-up menu. The Phantom Drive will be listed in My Computer and assigned a drive letter, and show that it has a disc in it. You can then view the contents just as if it were a disc in your physical DVD drive. If you can't view the contents, then you probably aren't using Vista. If you are using XP, you need a UDF 2.5 reader installed. I don't know, but maybe your Blu-ray burner came with the driver. The only one that I know of comes from Nero. It's Nero InCD READER. It's a free download and a separate download from the other Nero products.

With Imgburn you have a couple ways you could go. If you use the ISO option, then in ImgBurn you would click on the "Write image file to disc" button that's on the start up screen. For the source you would navigate to the .ISO file on your hard drive.

Alternatively you could also click the "Write Files/Folders to disc" button. For the source you click the "Browse for folder" icon and navigate to the VIDEO_TS folder (for a DVD-Video) on the Phantom Disc. This way you aren't dealing with the ISO concern. But I don't think that's an issue.

If you don't use the ISO option, then in ImgBurn you would click the "Write Files/Folders to disc" button. For the source you click the "Browse for folder" icon and navigate to the VIDEO_TS folder on the Phantom Disc.

I do not have a blu-ray burner, and I don't use Imgburn that much. I don't know about using ImgBurn with multiple Blu-ray writers.

[George Tyndall]

If you can't view the contents, then you probably aren't using Vista. If you are using XP, you need a UDF 2.5 reader installed. I don't know, but maybe your Blu-ray burner came with the driver. .... If you don't use the ISO option, then in ImgBurn you would click the "Write Files/Folders to disc" button. For the source you click the "Browse for folder" icon and navigate to the VIDEO_TS folder on the Phantom Disc.

Thank you very much for the VERY complete reply, Mr. Johnston ["Aww, you doesn't have to call me Mr. Johnston; you can call me RJ; or you can call me RJJ; or you can call me RJ Junior; but you doens't have to call me Mr. Johnston"--hehe*]

In fact, although I'm using XP MCE 2005/sp3 CyberLink does play the Phantom Disk from the Phantom Drive, but for some reason when I browse to the disk it does not recognize any Video_TS folder. So I will download ImgBurn and try that; my understanding is that many if not most muvipix members use that program for all their burning.

____
*Mr Johnston was a cigar-smoking, fedora-hat-wearing character on the TV series Hee-Haw, who brought the house down every time he came on stage and repeated, week after week, those same words.

[RJ Johnston]

Of course, of course, there is no VIDEO_TS folder on blu-ray discs. But you do see folders and files, don't you?