MPEG-2 Exporting- FCP 6

[andythefilmer]

I am sure this is covered somewhere, but I had no luck finding it. I have a 70 min graduation video I did, and I need to distribute the DVD's very soon. I just purchased Final Cut Studio 2 as an upgrade from Final Cut Express so I am pretty familiar with the Final Cut application itself, but compressor is very confusing to me. I edited the video before I got FCS and FCE doesn't have multicam capabilities, so I used someone else's Premiere Pro trial to cut it because it has multicam. So I have the .mov file and it is about 15.5 GB. Adobe Encore doesn't work in trial mode, so I just decided to put the .mov file in a final cut timeline and then try to create a DVD in DVD Studio Pro. I used to use iDVD, so I am not used to having to only use assets in .m2v. I only found one tutorial online about MPEG-2, but it was extremely outdated, from 2001 when FCP had a direct MPEG-2 export feature. I did File>Export>Export Using Compressor, then it opened up Compressor. I went to the formats tab and selected MPEG-2 DVD for up to 90 min. of video. I dragged that in to the timeline at the top. Where do I go from there? I am not even completely sure what compressor is designed to do. I want to burn a master copy by next week and then duplicate it. Thanks

 

[Alex H.]

If you have the edited movie file, why did you even bother to put it into a FCP project? There's no need for FCP here.

Compressor is an app for converting video formats, compressing/prepping final outputs for Internet and DVD, etc. In fact, since you now have Studio, don't bother deinterlacing 60i footage (if you ever have any) for Internet within FCP. Compressor is better for that.

Open Compressor and use it as a standalone. FCS comes with great tutorials and pretty decent-to-navigate literature. You should be able to be up and running fairly quickly. Honestly, this is too intensive of a process to give you a step-by-step here.