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Outputting short film for DVD
I have just finished rough-cutting a 10-minute film. The captured footage is HDV. I have also pulled in some DVD footage (originally DV, I think, and captured into Final Cut via MPEG-Streamclip), but the sequence setting is HDV 1080i60. I need to provide a client with as good a quality DVD as possible. I don’t need menus or any fancy DVD authoring stuff – just a slate at the top and a countdown clock and the movie. It needs to play at best possible quality on a DVD player and TV – NOT on a computer.
So, this is what I did (my first DVD output ever): I rendered everything, saved the project under another name (“saved as”), made sure my motion filtering quality was set at “best” in my sequence settings, put an in-point at the start of the sequence and an end-point at the end, and exported it as a QuickTime movie.
I then dragged QT file to iDVD and burned it. All this was pretty simple.
But when I test-played it on my 16×9 HD TV, I didn’t care for the quality. There seemed to be problems mainly in the transitions (dissolves, etc.), and I began to suspect that the compression iDVD uses to get a QT file into a format for DVD might be crappy. Then I remembered 2 things:
1) I remembered a May 26 article I saw on Ken Stone’s site about exporting HDV from the timeline into standard def DVD format, using Apple ProRes 422. I wondered if this would improve the quality of what ended up on the DVD.
2) And then I remembered a workflow a friend had told me about outputting to DVD. He had said to take the QuickTime file and load it into Compressor, which will turn it into an MPEG-2 file and an audio file (e.g., AIFF). I think this is called “demuxing.”
My questions: Will doing it the way my friend suggested result in a better quality DVD than simply dragging the QT movie into iDVD? If I do this, how do I get the two files (video and audio) onto a DVD together? iDVD doesn’t seem to be able to handle mpeg-2 files, and I wouldn’t know how to put the 2 files into it and have them be in sync. Is there a way to do this with either Toast or DVD Studio Pro?
Thanks a lot.
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3 Replies
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[Paul Spillenger] “Will doing it the way my friend suggested result in a better quality DVD than simply dragging the QT movie into iDVD?”
Yes, absolutely. Use Compressor because you have much more control over the encoding process.
[Paul Spillenger] “iDVD doesn’t seem to be able to handle mpeg-2 files, and I wouldn’t know how to put the 2 files into it and have them be in sync.”
If you use Compressor you encode the video to MPEG2 and encode the audio to the industry standard AC3 file format for DVD. Use DVDSP for your DVD authoring program and drag both the MPEG2 file and the AC3 file into a track where they will automatically be synced up. Since you don’t want menus you can create a “first play” DVD in DVDSP by reading this:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/first_play_warmouth.html
When it comes time to burn your DVD I recommend that you don’t use DVDSP to burn but instead create a Disk Image and use that to burn your disk using Apple’s Disc Utility. You can learn how to do that right here:
https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/image_to_disk_stone.html
– Don
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Check the archives for information on adding compression markers to the time line that are adjacent to complex effects wherever they appear in the project.
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I can answer part of your question. iDVD will not accept MPEG files unfortunately! You have to use DVD Studio Pro.
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