Quality Loss from Laying Off to Tape

[Moseph]

I'm currently working on a video in FCP 5 that will probably be somewhere around 30 minutes long, but the problem is that I don't really have, or have means of acquiring, a good DVD encoding software. So I figured I could just drop everything into the sequence like you'd normally do, but lay it off to a DV tape, and then import it to the one of the Avid suites at my school to do the encoding and burn a master copy. My question is, will there be any quality loss? I know there shouldn't really be a significant amount because everything is digital, but I do have quite a few heavily color graded / corrected clips in there and there is one sequence shot in HDV 24F downrezzed to SD for better sharpness. Not to mention it is a pretty crazy workflow too.
Thanks.

 

[Alex H.]

Depends on what SD codec you're working in. If you are working in DV NTSC< then no... no quaiity loss at all. It is, after all, all 1s and 0s that do not change. It won't be "re"-compressed on the way out.

If you are working in a higher SD codec, like DVCPRO 50, then technically yes. It's being dropped to a lesser codec. It will still look pretty darn good, though.

If you have FCP version 5, why don't you have DVDSP? I don't remember FCP5 being sold outside of FCS.