Can anybody help me?
I have a Powerbook G4 running an old FCP version1.2.5 because a new version refused to run. So I am editing in Mac OS 9.2 and want to do the burning in Mac OS X. How do I proceed without loss of quality?

You could export your movie as a quicktime movie and burn the DATA to a DVD as data. This DVD will only work on computers.

2- If you want your video to be played on DVD players, then try using iDVD to burn a DVD. This will lose quality. If the DVD is under an hour then you will get excellent quality. Some versions of iDVD may mess up dissolves from black.

Would either solution work for you?

Wow, that version of FCP is an antique! Why won't newer versions work for you? I ran FCP 3 on my Powerbook G4/667 under MacOS9.2 without any problems.

This may not be the sort of solution you want, but a very simple way to burn DVD's is using a standalone recorder with firewire input. These are getting cheaper and cheaper these days. I don't have SuperDrives on any of my Macs, so I'm using a Sony RDR-GX7 to burn DVD's and the results have been very good. Note that I just want to put video onto a disk though, not make any custom menus, etc. But an added bonus to the DVD recorder is component video output which I use to connect a widescreen monitor for editing.

Save your movie as a Self Contained FCP movie. Then boot to OS X and use iDVD to encode and burn to DVD.

Converting any movie to DVD, by definition, decreases the quality of the movie since you are heavily compressing it. But if the encoder used to make the MPG2 for the DVD authoring is high quality, you won't notice.

I use a G3 at home a nd a G5 at work. We use iDVD to make client proofs and it works pretty well. We don't do much DVD authoring for clients at this time but plan to in the near future and have DVD Studio pro for when the time comes.

At home on my G3 I use an encoder called BitVice http://www.innobits.se

It's quite good. It's a stand alone MPG2 encoder, whereas DVDSP and iDVD have built in encoders.

This is probably more than you wanted to know but check the link above if you are interested in it.

Glenn, Boyd and Dave thanks very much for all your advice, I will let you guys know about my progress in burning FCP material into a DVD.
Talk to you soon.

As for the built in encoders like Compressor or Quicktime (regular), which is better and what settings should i just for maximum quality to export to DVDSP2?

Dave
I installed Bitvice
Wow man I can go to sleep to encode 15 minutes of video
Burning though doesn't work
invalid something
Go for DVD Studio Pro soon
Let you know