Justin, see my post above. iDVD is an amateur product and as such is not going to deliver the quality you want. Upgrading to iDVD 4 will probably not be a big enough improvement in quality to meet your expectations.

In FCP you should be choosing Export. How are you getting your file out of FCP?

I am going to 'Export' and have tried both Quicktime and Final Cut Movie. Both give unsatisfactory results.

Even if iDVD is an amateur product (less features etc) - you should still be able to burn a DVD without it completely ruining the footage. Surely that is just the BASIC function of it - without that the product is a non-product - completely useless.

Or maybe the problem is Final Cut Express. If that is the case then Apple should not even be selling it - it should be withdrawn - what is the point of it if at the end of the day the DVD quality is crap.

justin, one problem here is that you don't know the bitrates that your mpeg2 is being encoded at.

so talking about software settings is a waste of time, if you can't quantify the end result.

i can't help you because you are on a mac, but surely there must be an easy way to look at the file you just encoded, and see what the frame rate, bitrate, frame size, etc., is.

The issue is not Express. It uses the same encoder as FCP and I can assure that FCP produces great quality output. iDVD is given away free with new computers. It's free! You can not adjust the bit rate. My son who is ten, why wife who is 42 (gonna get in trouble for that one) and my father who is 83 all use iDVD and are happy with the results. However, their expectations are lower than yours. I rarely use iDVD because I see artifacts from the encoding in some of my scenes.

When you do an export there is an options button on the save dialog box, but you must first select export movie to Quicktime movie. Then, when you click options you will have more options. :-) You will have the ability to set three things: Video settings, Audio settings and I believe the third has to do with Internet. For the Video settings click the first button I think, it adjusts the codec. A new screen will allow you to choose the codec, use uncompressed. Another thing to check is the size. Click that button and make sure it is set to full DV size (if you use current settings you might get something weird). For Audio, make sure it is uncompressed audio. For Internet... you can just ignore. Those settings are for if you want to stream your QT movie. Check the size of your final output. A DV QT movie is 1GB per five minutes so 2 minutes would still be 400 MB or so and uncompressed would be even larger. THEN you can be sure by opening the movie in QT and doing get info to see the codec used. Sorry if this isn't exactly right, at work I use PCs and don't have access to a full version of QT.

Thanks to everyone that has helped me try to get to the root of this problem.

I have now managed to resolve the problem with the Quicktime version (but not the Final Cut Movie version) - the results seem adequate.

A bad workmen always blames his tools - as they say. I was just missing an option hidden away where 'miilions of colours' could be selected rather than 'thousands of colours'. I only found out by clicking get info on the exported file from within QT and saw that it said 'thousands'. Simple really - doh!!!

Thanks very much again to everyone for helping me out with this.

PS I think I'm going to upgrade to DVDSP for future projects. Cheers!

Another thing worth checking is your leads. Are they all plugged in correctly. We had the same problem when we first set-up our DVD system. We use a 28 inch widescreen as a monitor and had one of the scarts going the wrong way. It occured that the problem was more serious, so we overlooked it 'till the end. Wish we'd done it first.

What is a scart?

It is a standardized European audio/video connector that replaces our RCA connectors.

huh?

Is it passive?

Do you have a picture?

Best picture I could find, try entering a search in Google.

A better picture of the SCART connector

Scart carries both video and audio. It normally carries composite
but can just as well carry s-video. It also is two way. So with one
cable you send video and audio to and from a device.

If I remember correctly it can also do RGB. It is much used here
in Europe.