For the creative professional, there are a few nifty features and tools in Toast 8, including support for Blu-ray DVDs and cross-platform data-spanning backups. Blu-ray support is just that: support for all the blue-ray DVD burners being announced this week at MacWorld. The Blu-ray support in Toast is dynamic, meaning it will treat your disc just like a hard drive volume. With capacity of 50GB per disc, Blue Ray makes a great backup medium, among its other uses.

Cross-platform data-spanning is a very handy feature for creative professionals who create their media on Macs but may need to share it with PC-based clients. Prior to the availability of this option, files had to be compressed to fit on a single disc. Or if there was a series of discs, you had to package up a separate viewer and catalog for each disc -- a time-consuming process. The data span option in Toast automatically creates a catalog and viewer on each disc, so that no matter which disc from the series your client inserts, the entire catalog will be available, and it will prompt them for the correct disc. As I said, professional output houses will love this feature.

Summary

Overall, Toast 8 is a real winner. There are many new features that make the purchase or upgrade worthwhile. And since Toast 8 is the exclusive enabler of Tivo2Go for Mac users, that alone makes this package a must-have.