[Dennis Leppell]

Seriously, give up on the iDVD idea. It may get the job done, but DVD SP is part of the entire Final Cut Suite. It’s meant to work with FCP, Compressor, Motion, et al. If you drop your FCP self contained movie into the asset bin in DVD SP, it will automatically encode the video using the ‘engine’ in Compressor….If you delve deeper into the preferences of DVD SP, you cam even adjust the default encode rates, or have it encode in the background while you build the menus. It’s very powerful, and not that hard to learn. You’re going to be encoding in Compressor for a while anyways, why not just open the program and try it?

Follow Michael’s instructions, and you’ll get it done.

[Dennis Leppell]

you probably need to render

[Dennis Leppell]

it will -potentially- help, but I still think your best bet is to up the deinterlace setting in the frame controls. But if you do that, increasing your bitrate definately won’t hurt your render time significantly.

Now keep in mind though, that what you output isn’t necessarily what youtube will broadcast. They will re-encode it on their end, to conform to their standards. And without knowing their workflow, it’s a crapshoot on exactly what is the best practice for upload. Which is why I prefer Metacafe.com and others. Ken Stone gives a pretty good general overview, with a good balance on render time, quality, and output size. If you have the luxury of time, you can always improve on it by increasing the various settings.

BTW, i think you may be correct on the gamma shift/color saturation thing.

[Dennis Leppell]

When you’re adjusting all your settings h.264 in Compressor, look at the inspector window. Click video settings. In the window that opens, in the upper right corner you can choose automatic or restrict. Set that to whatever number you’d like….I think it’s defaulted to 3000 for ken stones template, so you can double or triple that and be fine in this instance.

[Dennis Leppell]

Sure, double (or more) your data rate in the quicktime video settings. May want to boost your saturation a little also, your vid looked a little washed out, but that may be just me. You can do that in the filters setting in Compressor

[Dennis Leppell]

I just checked it out and it seems for the most part fine. The stuttering on your end may be your internet connection. Not that there’s necessarily a problem with the connection itself…there may be a lot of network traffic further upstream, and so to ensure everyone gets service, you’re bandwidth may be temporarily reduced. Pause the video and wait a little while, you’ll see the red bar go across as the video completely loads. Give it a bit of cushion before pressing play.

There’s two problems that I see with the video itself. Audio seemed out of sync by a couple frames, but it’s not that big of a deal, probably from the encoding. If you’re a stickler, you can dig into that. The other is the nice, smooth camera pan’s stutter a little. This is from the encoding process, and to combat this you would crank up the Deinterlace in the Retiming Controls to Better or Best, though this will increase your render time significantly.

[Dennis Leppell]

effects===>video filters====>channel=====>invert

[Dennis Leppell]

f5 will lock/unlock all existing audio tracks. f4 for video

[Dennis Leppell]

if this is a standard definition, 4:3 DVD, your FCP settings are off.

720×480
DV-NTSC

If it’s HD, 1280×720 (for 720P)

I know it’s (the FCP settings) smaller than the Camtasia export…. the Camtasia footage gets scaled down to fit the screen (assuming this is SD video). We left Camtasia at a higher resolution to get the most versatility out of it….so if you need to zoom in on a part, the image won’t degrade.

If you export the timeline and view the video on your computer, it probably will look like a mess….NTSC video (which is interlaced) is for TV playback, not a computer (progressive). Once you burn it to DVD, it should look exactly like it should.

Tom, if you see this, there’s a chance I’m missing something here, or misinterpreting something. Could you please clarify….it’s sometimes hard for me to explain my workflow, especially when writing from memory (i’ve been working on a PC for the last week or so, no FCP in front of me to check), and since you wrote the book (literally), you may pick up what I’m missing.

REGARDING WORKFLOW, I still prefer exporting a self-contained quicktime from FCP and dropping that directly into DVD Studio Pro, whereas many will say to export MPEG2 video and AIFF audio, or export self-contained, bring that to Compressor to make an MPEG2+AIFF. Exporting a self-contained is much faster than exporting MPEG2+AIFF from FCP, so you do the export, drop into DVD SP and get back to work. Exporting self contained, bringing that to Compressor for the MPEG2+AIFF, and bringing those to DVD SP is adding an extra step, since DVD SP would use Compressor internally to make the same files. Time is money, so the less steps/faster steps, the better

[Dennis Leppell]

if the clips all have in/out points set when you open them in the browser, and are named/numbered in a manner that if you do a sort (clicking the category in the browser window), you can drag them to the canvas and drop them on the ‘insert with transition’. They will all be laid out with your default transition in place. To set your default transition, open the effects tab, find the transition you want to set, set the length of that transition within the browser window, and then right click, set as default.

Or you, can set your default transition, and then use the up or down arrows to go to the next cut, and hit command-T.