Question Exporting HD footage from FCP to DVD studio Pro.
 

I recently shot a wedding with 2 HD100s in 24p.
I captured my footage with HDVxDV. I exported out the .M2T files with the Apple Intermediate Codec then Took them to CINEMATOOLS to comfort them to 23.98 fps.

I'm editing in FCP 5.0 in 24p - 720p , and I'll make a
DVD in DVD studio Pro 4.0.

** Here is my question **
What are the best settings to export my footage from FCP to DVD studio Pro??

Thank you in advance,
Rafael

Just use Compressor to go straight to an MPEG2, The way the Apple presets are, you don't need to tell it anything except whether you want the resulting MPEG2 to be 16x9, thus making the DVD player do the letterboxing.

In the filters are for the preset you use, add sharpening to about +3 or 4. When downconverting, the in-camera edge enhancement becomes sub-pixel sized, and gets averaged out. If you shot with detail off or very low, you might want to skip this suggestion.

FCP to Compressor Work Arounds
 

I have had lots of problems exporting a timeline directly from FCP to Compressor. This usually creates overly crushed blacks and color saturation problems. A simple work around is to export the timeline as a reference movie, close down FCP and directly import the reference movie into Compressor.

I have also had issues with Compressor scaling the HD files down to standard def, and end up with very jagged images during the downconvert. To solve this problem, I import the entire movie into After Effects, scale in down into the appropriate resolution, and export an uncompressed file with audio. I then import the uncompressed file into Compressor for really great results.

Hope this helps,

Dave Dessel

We have tested lots of mpeg 2 encoding software options extensively and found Compressor to be the weakest. Integration is one thing but quality is even more important. I have consistently found Procoder to be the best reasonably-priced software encoder for MPEG2. But you'll need a PC...