Okay, so I just finished my first "OFFICIAL" FCP edit. Now to put it on DVD...

[c.g._eads]

Okay, so I just finished my first "OFFICIAL" FCP edit. Now to put it on DVD...

I just finished my first cut of a short movie (11 minutes) that I would like to put on DVD to look at on a 16x9 HDTV. I exported from the sequence to a quicktime movie, dropped it in iDVD, burned it, put it in my DVD player... and it looked terrible. First off, it wasn't 16x9. It was squished. In addition, the quality of the image (I haven't determined whether it was the crappy quicktime compression or just the fact that it was a 16x9 image scrunched up to 4x3) was terrible.

I need a little help here. My second guess was to use Media Comressor. I created a "best quality for 16x9 DVD" .m2v file (along with 2 sound files) in Compressor but when I tried to drop the video file into iDVD, it was denied like a Ben Gordon floating teardrop against the Pistons.

I have a medium understanding of the FCP and apple architecture, which is why I'm not really sure what to do (that and I've never burned to DVD with the express interest of aquiring a genuine DVD quality image before).

Please help.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[KingsReign]

The problem is iDVD. It does not handle Widescreen content properly. Also, is cannot injest already encoded .m2v fles. DVD Studio Pro is really the only solution that will make sure the Widescreen will work on a 4x3 letterboxed or stay native when on a 16x9. iDVD does not encode the proper anamoprhic flags correctly and only some players recognize it.

 

[FilmBoy77]

yea, iDVD sucks when it comes to quality. their compression features are more like a one size fits all type of deal. i just burned my short for the first time to DVD in the 16x9 format and it came out looking good. i used DVD Studio pro. it's pretty easy to figure out, took me a coupla days and a handful of dvd's to test in order to figure it completely.

 

[limeyx]

The problem is iDVD. It does not handle Widescreen content properly. Also, is cannot injest already encoded .m2v fles. DVD Studio Pro is really the only solution that will make sure the Widescreen will work on a 4x3 letterboxed or stay native when on a 16x9. iDVD does not encode the proper anamoprhic flags correctly and only some players recognize it.

I am stuck with iMovie right now (sadly) -- One thing to try is to download the "anamorphizer" application which will set the appropriate 16:9 flags in the movie so that iDVD does the "right thing"

What I have been doing (and it seems to work) is to export the reference movie from Final Cut (Express), then drop that into anamorphizer, and drag that into iDVD.

It seems to produce some acceptable output in real 16:9

there is also another application (script) "idvd-ana-fix" where you can run the final .img file through it, and it sets "even more" widescreen options.

I have not tried viewing any of my DVDs on a 4:3 screen though.