Export to DVD Compressor Settings!

[Andrew Simpson]

Hi David

many thanks for this – I suspected that there might be a conceptual gap with me on this one.

I take it from what you say that no matter what I do – there’s a ceiling on what a DVD player can physically read from a burned disk. Even if I could get my hands on an 18GB burnable DVD disk, then it would still look grainy and lacking definition – just as the 4.8GB version I have produced. This is not then about compressing the movie, this is about bit-rate, the amount of information that can be passed from the disk to the DVD player in time for it to make sense of it. If it is slow, the DVD player makes a worse job of displaying the results than if it is fast – is that what bit rate is?

I am assuming then that Apple’s software DVD player does not simulate accurately how a hardware DVD player will perform, hence why “Open DVD media” plays significantly better than my domestic (albeit good quality) DVD player.

As an aside (guilt) I have bought the “lucky” couple an external hard drive that they will be able to play the much better quality DV file from, so hopefully they won’t be suing me.

Perhaps I’ll be able to do more with this file with BlueRay or non-DVD media.

Many thanks for your help – the only solution is then to get better quality footage from the start!

[Gary Vincent]

First off I should say that I appreciate your feedback. I am also curious about maximizing the quality of a DVD. I have a half hour QT file that I created in FCP and it is about 6 and a half gig. After I compress the file using the 90 minute best quality preset it’s only 1.3 for the Video and 48 for the audio. Is there a way to split the difference on the amount of compression? Thanks, GV