compression quality in Compressor vs DVDSP?
 

I have always gone through Compressor, but after a long night of compressing 15 video tracks for a dual-layer DVD project (only to find incompatible GOP structures for the alternate angles... check your markers, kids!) and having to fix and re-export everything, I'm wondering if I should just take my FCP exports (with DVDSP markers) and drop them in DVDSP and let it do the transcoding. Any thoughts?

Does DVDSP essentially use Compressor under the hood, or is it using something else/lesser?

No way, DVDSP has extremely limited controls over quality and bitrate and zero controls for motion estimation and things like frame-rate conversion.

Use Compressor and the best method is to create reference movies from FCP and let Compressor grab the resources.

One issue I've been having with reference movies is that I cannot for the life of me get it to embed the chapter markers and have them read within DVDSP after encoding to MPEG2 with Compressor.

Ah, I never thought to use reference movies. I've always made self-contained movies. As long as the media is local, it shouldn't matter, eh?

Hey Simon, when you save your self-contained/reference movie, do you choose to include the chapter markers in the saving options?

Yep, I select Chapter Markers on the output.

Using markers and having them x-fer to DVDSP can be a tricky process regardless of which transport method you use. At the moment I'm short on time otherwise I'd share a ton of "how-to", suffice it to say Brian Gary has already done it for me:

Pick up two books which will take the mystery out of chapters - and other transport-processing methods once and for all...

1. DVDSP4, first or second edition (Apple Pro Training Series)

2. Compressor Quick Reference Guide, Brian Gary

Amazon always has them in stock; spend 30 mintues browsing both books and you'll master some of the more tricky encoding/authoring/transport issues.

Thanks for the references. I have the Apple Pro books for FCP and think they are great. Planning on getting the one for Color and I guess DVDSP now, as well.