[cynthia madansky] “Right now everything is in 9 separate parts self contained QT
I will bring them into DVD studio pro as one sequence
for compression and output.”
You will getter much better results if you bring your self-contained movies from FCP into Compressor for encoding and use the preset recommended by Shane. Don’t use DVDSP for encoding. Why is the movie in 9 separate parts? As Chris suggests, “If you want all clips to play as one, you’d make it easier outputting one long QT file. Drop it into compressor to create your DVD files.” In Compressor, make sure you encode your audio as well. You’ll end up with two files to bring into DVDSP – one .m2v (video) and one .ac3 (audio).
[cynthia madansky] “How long will it take to compress and output this dvd?
Is the compression and output in real time?
What kind of visual loss will I experience in the output?”
As Shane says, it depends on your machine, etc. – certainly not real time. As for visual loss, if you’re coming from a HD timeline, Compressor will also have to scale the movie (DVDs are SD) so you definitely will see some image loss – and it also adds to the time needed to do the job.
When you do the authoring in DVDSP make sure you don’t make a HD-DVD… that function is there, but it shouldn’t be.
HTH
Gary
This is me – this is what I do – https://web.mac.com/garymmw