FCP to DVD and QT (DVDSP4/High Precision YUV/Motion Estimate/Bit Rates)
 

Hey Everyone,

I have been trying to hunt through these forums to find an answer to my questions, but although there was heaps of great information, I couldn't find anything that really made me go "ah huh"!

I've just edited together a 10-minute documentary for uni. It was shot on a Sony Z1P. I shot in HDV, however I downconverted on camera while importing into FCP because editing HDV on my old eMac does take a bit of extra time and patience.

So, basically I've got a 16:9 DV-PAL timeline in FCP. I have set the motion estimate to "BEST" and used the "High Precision YUV" option. However, I'm not sure if using the "High Precision YUV" option will actually make that much of a difference!

Now, the tricky part!

Firstly I need to export a Quicktime file at the best possible quality to hand in for assessment. What I normally do is use "Quick Time Conversion". I tend to use "Photo - JPEG" with 100% quality. I manually set the size to 1024x576, and adjust the audio render settings to "BEST". I then export the footage, open it in Quicktime and select "Highest Quality" and "Deinterlace" in the properties screen. This seems to make the titles look their best. The file size is HUGE - but it seems to be really good quality. Now...is this the best way to export? Comments? Suggestions?

Secondly, I need to export the film to DVD. There seems to be no definite answer to this one on these forums. I would have THOUGHT that Compressor would be the best option. However, a lot of people seem to have problems with it. So, should I do the encoding in Compressor or directly in DVD Studio Pro 4?

From what I've read, I THINK the best option may be this:

- Export the timeline as a "Quicktime Movie" (reference files).
- Exit FCP. Drag the QT Movie into Compressor
- Use the DVD 90-minutes Best Quality setting (leave everything as Default)
- Exit Compressor. Drag the files in DVD Studio Pro.
- Burn DVD

But is this REALLY the best way to go about it? In the past I've always just exported as a QT Movie (reference files), and just dragged the file into DVD Studio Pro. The footage looks fine on a TV, although the titles do look a bit dodgy. Not sure if that's just the TV, the encoding or a limitation of the DVD format.

So yeah, basically, I'm just after a straight answer.

1. What's the best way to export a movie as a quicktime file (best quality)?
2. What's the best way to export a movie to DVD (best quality)?

I guess the main issue is titles and effects. Exporting as DV-PAL will ensure the footage is at the best quality it can possibly be. But, if I use DV-PAL the text and effects will look like crap. However, exporting as uncompressed (for example), will make everything look great - but what's the point of "up-converting" a piece of DV footage to uncompressed? It will just use up a heap of disk space with no real benefit!

I'm also curious about DVD bit rates. As this film is only 10 minutes, it will not use up that much space (compared to a 90 minute film). So I can, in theory, "push" the bit rates higher. But how high? I know if you use too high a bit rate the DVD player will struggle (if it works at all!). I heard somewhere that 7.2 is the max rate you can use. Correct?

So yeah, as you can see, I'm slightly confused by all of this! If you can shed any light on all this that would be great!

Also, I think this section needs a sticky explaining FCP to DVD Studio Pro settings, as this question seems to pop up a lot, but with no real resolve. I'd be more than happy to put it together, but as you can see, I don't really have any clear idea of what I'm doing!

Thanks in advance!

Chris!

Also:

Should I put a "Color Smoothing - 4:1:1" colour corrector over the whole sequence? What about a "Broadcast Safe" filter?

I know this isn't really a "DVD and Web Video Delivery" question, however I guess it may/will affect the quality of the QT File/DVD.

Today I tried exporting the 10-minute film via Compressor. However, viewing the results in QT, it looks like the conversion went really badly. I tried a variety of different settings. Exporting using QT conversion seems to be a lot more trouble free.

Anyone got any insight?

This is what I ended up doing for anyone who's interested:

For the Quicktime Export, I just did what I normally do (a "Photo - JPEG" export using Quicktime Converstion). File size is a bit large - however for a 10 minute short, it was quite exceptable, and the quality is great.

For the DVD export, what I ended up doing was exporting as a "Quicktime Movie" and just bringing that directly into DVD Studio Pro. Using Compressor seems silly for a 10 minute film and from my experiments, doesn't give you any better results.

Why not try this link here: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...tudio_pro.html

I found using compressor a bit awkward and much prefer this method. For batch work, compressor indeed may be a better solution in terms of work flow, however, if it's just one export you're doing this might work.

Once again, many thanks to Ken!

Thanks Valery! Although, that article is a bit out of date now (it's refereing to DVD Studio Pro 1 - I'm using 3). However, still some useful information. Cheers!