Which way is best?

[Hans Moleman]

For putting a feature on to a dvd, would it be better to export from my NLE uncompressed and then straight to the DVD with a very low data rate, or compress it with Canopus first, then ut it on a DVD with a higher data rate?

 

[sebastian]

Why would you uncompress your video? DV footage in camera's cassette is already compressed 5:1 with DV codec. So export from NLE as it is...AVI or MOV with DV codec and then compress to MPEG2 (DVD) with Canopus.
Uncompressing to "pure" AVI means more work (more disk space) but same quality as "original" DV.
You can use this: http://dvd-hq.info/Calculator.html
Originally ment for TMPGEnc encoder but works with Canopus as well.

(different thing if your video is taken from better source than DV camera...)

 

[lhmaloney]

what about utilizing the procoder plug in in adobe premiere to compress it to MPEG 2 then put it into the dvd authoring program