FCP to DVD?

Jay Rodriguez

Jay Rodriguez

Coffee Member
Ok so what's the trick to getting the best result?

I tried exporting as a QT movie.

I tried compressor>Best Quality 90 min.

Both aren't providing me with the image that I have within FCP.
 
Compress your FCP file as h.264 with quality on the highest setting, frame rate of 29 then hit save.

Find the file in your Finder.

And then open up iDVD and import it. iDVD might degrade the quality but thats how i would do it.
 
Never had any issues using the 90min best quality in compressor.In fact I've made a lot of DVDs using this preset Dont use .h264 as it would then go thru a second compression to the mpeg2 used for DVD.

Save your final movie from FCP at its full res QT movie and then drop it into compressor. Of course the MPEG2 wont look as good as your native files but I havent noticed any huge image degrading.
 
yeah i wouldn't go the h.264 route that was suggested. no need to compress twice.

I tried saving the final movie from FCP as the QT movie, brought into compressor but the results are actually crappy. Going FCP>compressor>Best Quality 90 min was the "better" of the two. My footage is RED footage but now it seems like the weakest link in my workflow is the DVD burning process, lol.
 
Jay Rodriguez said:
now it seems like the weakest link in my workflow is the DVD burning process, lol.
Click to expand...

Well...that's because it is.
:)

Taking RED footage down to SD DVD quality is going to hurt no matter what.
I've never been a big fan of compressor for DVD encoding (mainly due to the interface/options) - but that said I haven't seen anything out of the ordinary as far as quality goes... what are you noticing in the footage that makes you think compressor isn't doing as good a job as it theoretically should?
 
Hey Luis! What's up buddy?!

There's a very noticeable difference in the image between playing back the footage in FCP and playing back the burned DVD on the same laptop.

I have also played it back on a few different tv/dvd setups and have seen decent results but there's gotta be a way to get a DVD to look top notch.
 
If you have FCP 7, highly recommend reading the Ken Stone article on the new "Share" feature. There are some very cool, simple ways to create DVDs and even Blu-rays right from FCP. It actually uses Compressor, but you don't need to launch it (unless you want to). At the very least it will give you easy access to a good preset for DVD clips.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_7_share_stone.html
 
I'm still stuck on this if anyone has any input, please help.

What I don't understand is why is FCP to compressor compressing my 13 minute movie down so much. When I look at the m2v file that compressor creates it's only 580.8mb. Is there a way to get compressor to ease up on squeezing it down so much. Maybe that would help in getting better results?
 
Woah - yeah, that's ridiculous.
Can't you tweak with the compressor settings to lower the compression, instead of just using the presets?

The problem with the compressor presets is they are all designed for 90min files and above.

Jay Rodriguez said:
Hey Luis! What's up buddy?!
Click to expand...
Sorry - didn't see this the day you posted it.
Same ol' same ol'
:)
 
Well, you can only make the file so big, because of the bitrate limiitations of the DVD format - my guess is at the largest the file will be close to 1GB in size, roughly. But still, that should get you a marked difference in quality.
 
Jay Rodriguez said:
That's exactly what I'm trying to figure out now. madness lol
Click to expand...

Use the "DVD: Best Quality 90 Minutes" preset.

Open the inspector window for it, and go to the Video settings
(it should be set to Two Pass VBR)

Drag the sliders for the Minimum and Maximum bitrate as far to the right as you can.... it should let you take the minimum up to 7.7 and the max up to 9 or so.

That should give you a file size significantly larger than what you're getting now.
If that doesn't make sense let me know.
 
It does make sense. I've also tried it before and then tried it again this morning. Maybe I'm just going crazy trying to do something that can't be done or something. It kills me seeing this beautiful RED footage look like dv footage on a DVD. I wish there were a way to get a pretty accurate result by using the FCP>compressor>dvd studio pro combination.

When I say "a pretty accurate result" I mean, I know that I'm not going to get a DVD to look exactly like what I see in FCP but damn it would be nice.
 
Have you tried changing it from Variable Bitrate to Constant Bitrate, and just cranking it up to 9mbps?
At 13minutes, there really isn't any reason to do a Variable bitrate encode... seeing as keeping the entire thing at the maximum allowable rate is still going to yield a file that is significantly smaller than the full DVD space possible.
 
Here's the difference in results that I'm getting:

still-2.jpg




still-1.jpg
 
That could very well just be the drop in resolution you're seeing.
I don't know that you're going to get it much sharper than that - keep in mind you're having to drop it down to SD resolution.

If you're keeping it at 23.98fps and encoding at the highest rate possible... I don't see what else you can do.

EDITED TO ADD:
I see that top file says it was encoded at 6.2Mbps
You should be able to encode the whole thing at 9Mbps, might help a little bit.
But I'm not sure it's going to be the night/day difference you're looking for.
 
Yeah the one I encoded at (I think) 7Mbps I ended up deleting because I didn't see much of a difference. I'll do it again and post a still when it's complete. also, from what I read, if I encode it at its max I'll have major compatibility issues with many DVD players.
 
Jay Rodriguez said:
if I encode it at its max I'll have major compatibility issues with many DVD players.
Click to expand...

True - but it would also give you a standard by which you can judge the best possible image you can get.

Honeslty, I don't see it getting much better though - that's SD for you.
:thumbsup:
 
I'll keep plugging away to see what I can come up with. The sad thing is that it looks pretty good on my ps3 but it looks worst than the example above on a regular dvd player lol.
 
Ok, that compressor job is finished and it looks the same pretty much. Also I noticed that the in the name of the file it still says "6.2Mbps" even though I maxed it out to 7.7, strange....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top