I have a friend who uses FCP along with Compressor. He complains that the resolution looks too soft after he converts HD to SD MPEG-2 in preparation to make a DVD. There is a long thread in the Vegas thread about resizing. http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-happens-vegas/271329-maximizing-hd-sd-quality.html Are there similar techniques and tools to improve HD to SD conversion with FCP?

Yes. DO a search on DVD workflow and you will find various ones. I recapped the basic approach in this recent thread:
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/final-cut-suite/488323-setting-up-fcp-workflow-xdcamhd-multi-cam-edit.html

Others I've benefitted from:
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/sony-xdcam-hd-cinealta/470701-downconverting-sharper-sd-image.html

I've had good luck taking the HD project and then importing it into a FCP project with SD settings, then exporting. I use Toast for my DVDs. I try not to use compressor.

I did a project recently where we down sampled HD to SD and I found that Compressor/Final Cut Pro did a pretty terrible job of it. But After Effects worked MUCH better. So if you have access to After Effects you might try converting your footage in there.

Compressor and Final Cut work just fine if you use the workflows prescribed in the articles I referred to above. In one case, it's as easy as copy/paste/export.

I did a project recently where we down sampled HD to SD and I found that Compressor/Final Cut Pro did a pretty terrible job of it. But After Effects worked MUCH better. So if you have access to After Effects you might try converting your footage in there.

I've seen this said a lot - but when I tried it I saw no real difference in the end product.

Dunno. The difference was pretty marked for me. Using compressor, the final product was very soft. After Effects just came out better. It's entirely possible I was doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what it would be.

The other problem I found was that I lost the chapter markers too :(

Dunno. The difference was pretty marked for me. Using compressor, the final product was very soft. After Effects just came out better. It's entirely possible I was doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what it would be.
The trick using compressor is the frame control panel, each parameter can effect the result quite considerably depending on the exact format of the HD material . I always downres to either prores HQ or Animation codec. I believe that the codec to which you downscale can actually determines the sophistication of the algorithm used. In my experience downscaling directly to mpeg was considerably softer than downscaling to Prores and then transcoding to mpeg. In my experience you must avoid downscaling interlaced material, regardless of the method or codec used, If need be convert the interlaced material to 50P and then downscale and reninterlace if necessary. If you deinterlace hd material you should use a method which prevents the image moving up or down one scanline per frame such as JES deinterlacer (free from Apple).

regards

Ian Skurrie

I thought the interlacing might have caused problems. We shot in 60i as we knew we would have to deliver NTSC SD. Thanks for the tips. But honestly, since we have After Effects, and since it did a pretty good job in one pass, I doubt I'll turn to compressor to make three passes (deinterlacing, down scaling, and reinterlacing). Although, its probably worth running some tests just to see how it comes out with this method. After Effects, while better, was still a little soft, but I figured there was no way around losing some sharpness going through the conversion.

I thought the interlacing might have caused problems. We shot in 60i as we knew we would have to deliver NTSC SD. Thanks for the tips. But honestly, since we have After Effects, and since it did a pretty good job in one pass, I doubt I'll turn to compressor to make three passes (deinterlacing, down scaling, and reinterlacing). Although, its probably worth running some tests just to see how it comes out with this method. After Effects, while better, was still a little soft, but I figured there was no way around losing some sharpness going through the conversion.

You can do all of this in one pass in Compressor, not three.