Making a Sweet, Sharp DVD

[Ebony Winston]

When making a longer piece to fit on dvd’s I usually use compressor. I recently just put together a 40 minute documentary that was about 10 or so GB when exported as a quicktime file, so I ran it through compressor as a mpeg 2 file which cut it to about 600 MB or so. I have found any of the settings you use will cut the file size significantly.

[Eric Peterson]

Easiest way is to export from FCP through compressor and use the 60 minute best quality setting. All DVD’s are mpeg2. Your past files were converted behind the scenes.

[Rob Gee]

Is there a good thunmbnail guide to using Comperessor? the manual doesn’t seem to be much help on this. What are the basic steps I must take to export a timeline sequence into Studio Pro? Thanks very much.

[Bryce Whiteside]

Maybe not the definitive guide, but an excellent procedure non-the-less:

Name: Joel Peregrine
Date: Feb 11, 2004 at 7:54 am
Subject: Re: Help Getting More Data on DVD
https://tinyurl.com/b8u7g

Happy reading…
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Jerry Alto]

Rob G.- From FCP export>compressor>select the quality (60 minute High Quality)>also select destination of the files (I like to use my 2nd internal drive rather that MacHD). No worry about size restrictions until your timeline gets to over 60 minutes.

[Rob Gee]

Excellent. Just what I was looking for. Thank you.

[Francois Stark]

You are confusing the uses of the QT and MPEG 2 files.

QT uncompressed or QT DV is what you would export from FCP. This is a big file and does not have to fit into 4.7GB for the DVD, because compressor or DVDStudio will recompress this file to Mpeg 2 for the DVD format. QT Uncompressed is about 1.2GB per minute, which means a 30 minute video will take up about 36GB!

The compressed MPEG 2 file, together with the audio file(s) must fit into 4.7GB. DVDStudio and Compressor have several settings to trade off the quality versus size of the resultant MPEG 2 file to get it to fit into 4.7GB for the length of video you have.

All cleared up?

Francois

[Rob Gee]

Yes, and no, Francois. Thanks for your full answer, though. Is it better, then, to perform the compression before I import the file into StudioPro, or can I expect to see better results by inmporting a large file into StudioPro, and letting it do the compression? – Rob

[Nick Brenner]

What I do is – select the timeline you want to export from FCP, go to export choose Compressor then select – 60 minutes best, All, then select where you want the audio and Video file to go Suggest start a new folder to put them both into, then go to next column and and make the file names shorter but leave the tags.
Then let compressor do its thing. Go to sleep for the night.
Wake up check the files. About one and a half gigs. Then open DVD studio pro and import them.
A couple of reasons. DVD studio pro and Compressor use the same engine so the files will look the same. therefore you are wasting you time exporting the QT movie (one extra step) and then converting to Mpeg2 also one less loss of quality. Also you dont have the large redundant QT file.
Another reason is that in FCP if you double click n on the timeline you can create a frame accurate marker (select marker and name) whereas in DVD studio you can’t do frame accurate due to GOP and nature of MPEG2.
If you export from FCP to compressor – it will be a very fast process in DVD studio as the program does not have to spend hours changing the QT to Mpeg. It’s be done.
Good luck.

docofilms PAL 25fps

[Alexander Kallas]

Rob,
I always use mpeg2 files that have been compressed outside of DVDSP. This gives me more control over the transcode.
One proviso, for composited menus, let DVDSP create the file, else it will be recompressed, not good for quality.
Alexander