Best quality DVD export from Final Cut Pro

[Ronald Schot]

Dear Dan,
I have final cut pro and in my compressor, i cant find dvd 90 minuts. I have a poor quality exporting hi8 and vhs to dvd, can you help me.

Thanks, Ronald

[Eric Dubé]

Is it normal when i use compressor dvd best quality 90 min it brings my 1080 to 720x 480.

Eric

[Calvin Ketshabetswe]

I have gone thru the threads. Quite helpful. Just that the compressor method takes a bit longer since dvd sp does encoding….

[Kerwin Liu]

Do you mean you want to burn the video from FCP to a blank DVD? then you can use the File -> Export -> Conversion. Set the Compression Setting to MPEG-2. The codec is universal.

[Alex Petrovitch]

Evan –
Did you ever get a response for the best quality export for a DVD to match those of studios?

[Mark Merton]

It does seem we can never hope to achieve good results exporting from Final Cut Pro to DVD, no matter what we do. I’ve tried every solution and method on the internet, and my movies still look crap when played on a TV through a DVD player. I guess that’s just how it is. Big shame, because the quality of my movies is so good from the camera, (5DMk2 at 1920 x 1080), looks perfect on computer screen, but turns to blurry rubbish on DVD.

Sigh….

The best I’ve been able to come up with is exporting the movie with current settings from FCP, bringing that into Compressor and using an MPEG 2 preset corresponding with the duration, bringing that and exported audio from FCP into DVD Studio Pro, and burning from there. Still blurry and ugly, but seems to be as good as it gets.

You’d think in this day and age…..

[Alex Petrovitch]

There has to be a way. I will let you know when I find it. I’m assuming that you’ve tried everything on Compressor.

Ed Burns just shot a movie “Newlyweds” on the 5D MkII, and it looks great on my Apple TV when I view the trailer on my TV. Now, maybe Apple iTunes does a better job of encoding, but there is definitely a way.

[Kim Kato]

Hi,

I’ve been learning a lot on this forum so I figured I should contribute. I had issues with Mini-DV to DVD and had horrible quality and pixelation! I realized it was the compression or compressors causing the problems. I ended up using Canopus Pro Coder to compress MPEG-2’s prior to burning. It was able to compress but keep high quality. I also managed to duplicate this Sony Vegas Studio by bumping the bit rate very high.

Anyways, I followed a few suggestions on here regarding FCP7 and found the DVD quality was terrible. Ironically, Canon’s free software, Pixela Video Browser did a better job with DVD quality. Anyways, I think the problem is relying on the default compression settings in FCP7.

Recently, I used iMoives and converted MP4’s (taken with a Canon M52 ) with Quicktime H.264 Large File settings and then burned with iDVD. Turned out perfect!

So here’s my theory, right now I’m using FCP7 and exporting (via share) with Quicktime H.264 @ default settings, I think 1924×1080? Then I’ll burn with DVD Studio or iDVD. I think the quality will dramtically improve!

[Evan Darnley-pentes]

A couple of years later and I know the answer. Well there are many ways to skin a cat some a quicker and neater than others.

Where I got to was a simple answer for most video production workflows.

1. The DVDs at the Rental shops are encoded down from HD/2k+ projects so they are able to get sharper and better quality SD DVDs than I ever will with an SD workflow.

2. Know what format you are starting in and what your finished format and medium will be.
understand a Package/CODEC/Bitrate(VBR or CBR)/Resolution
e.g .VOB/MPEG2/7600kbps CBR/720x576anamorphic

3. Shift the format of your video as little as possible in any workflow .

4. always scale down resolution from step to step, never scale up e.g dont start with a 400×300 pixel video and scale it up to 800×600, thats stupid.

5. choose the best quality 2 or more pass encoding setting. who cares if it takes longer to encode, your left with a much better quality video, at a much lower file size and all the motion will look smoother.

6. Adobe Premier has finally overtaken FCP as best editing tool. will recognise AVCHD videos out of Sony HD cameras without having to log and transfer them into Apple Pro Res 422 first. the finished youtube or DVD videos look much better because of step 3.

[Freddie Munoz]

So Walter, once I’ve done this step, do I just drag and drop into dvd studio pro and burn?

I don’t need menu’s and all that, I just want it to be as high quality for DVD as possible to play for the clients.