How to burn a very long timeline to DVD?

[Kylee Pena]

OK, I’m going to try to give you some guidelines here. I hope that some of this works for you, it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on.

First, you shouldn’t change any of the settings when you export a Quicktime reference movie. You should leave it at whatever pops up and make sure “Make self-contained” is NOT checked. It should be “Current Settings”, Include Audio and Video, Markers None (unless you have chapter markers…). The great thing about this is that you shouldn’t be spending hardly any time at all creating this file, since it’s just basically a roadmap to your footage, not footage itself. (As a sidenote, make sure you don’t use this as your archive or backup copy, because if you move anything around, all the connections will break!) Don’t worry about this reference movie’s frame size or anything, you’ll bring it down to standard def in Compressor. The file you get out of FCP should be 1920×1080.

Second, did you mean that you’re exporting as DV PAL, or when you do the Quicktime reference, is it automatically set to DV PAL? The reference movie grabs whatever editing codec you chose. You can find this under the sequence settings. For your HD footage, it shouldn’t be DV PAL. It should be ProRes. In your sequence settings, if it’s set to DV PAL, just change it to ProRes 422. If it’s something else, probably just leave it alone. If you do change it to ProRes, the sequence will probably need to re-render.

OK, once you have your reference movie, which shouldn’t be a very big file at all, and should look pretty good since it’s still HD, open up Compressor and drag that reference movie in. Then find the 120 min best quality preset and drag it on your footage. Make sure it’s going to the correct frame size for your PAL stuff (you can change settings within Compressor very easily, after you drag the preset on your footage, click on it and the Inspector will change. Then you can go into the frame controls and stuff and make it the correct size. I can’t remember if there are different categories of presets for NTSC or PAL, or if you just need to change it to PAL within the settings, but you can do it all here. This is the step that will take a while.

The files you get out of Compressor will be a standard definition m2v file, and a ac3 file for audio. You will use these in DVD Studio Pro to author your DVD.

I hope this helps a bit!

[Daniel Grixti]

That is so helpful! Thank you!

I seem to be having a problem though. I can’t seem to create a reference movie? When I export using your instructions with the ‘make self contained’ box UNCHECKED, I think my FCP is creating a self contained file!

I have exported an identical clip with the box checked and un-checked and the resulting .movs are the same size? It seems that when I try to create a reference file it is not letting me?

If I was to just export the whole project as a PreRes442 DV file, then convert that to MPEG2 or m2v, then use that in DVDSP, would this be pretty much the same as your method?

[Kylee Pena]

Is your sequence fully rendered? I mean, FULLY rendered. Go to Sequence > Render ALL and Sequence > Render selection menus and make sure that all the options are checked, including ‘full’. Then render one more time and try the reference movie again. Also, you said your editing codec was DV, but go check that. If it’s something that uses temporal compression like mpeg, a reference movie won’t work because of the way those files operate.

Basically, do what I suggest above with rendering the whole thing completely and fully, check your codec, and then try the reference movie again.

(The reason for this is that you probably have RT effects in your timeline that you can view perfectly fine even though they are technically unrendered. Once the movie leaves FCP, it doesn’t that that nice luxury of RT playback, so the effects must be baked into the export, whether it’s a reference or not. So FCP sees you want a reference, but still puts together these effects for you, and the file sizes end up the same.)

EDIT: Also, what you suggest is the same idea but adds another generation of compression, which is something you definitely want to avoid.