Wondering if anyone can give me some advice on the best compression for a 100 minute video that was shot on miniDV to put on DVD. I am exporting the edited sequence from FCP 5.0 and I will be using DVD Studio Pro.
What is considered better for this, using Compressor or Quicktime?
And then what would be the best settings.

Thanks in advance for any help...

I haven't used the encoder in DVDSP4 since I use compressor 2.

I find that when you export to compressor directly out of FCP5 the job takes forever.

Export to QT. then drop that QT into compressor. This is always much faster in the end. It does eat up extra drive space but who's counting these days.

Compressor has many settings that can be very useful depending on your needs. It's manual is worth studying.

lewis

I like sorenson squeeze and have had very good luck with it. They have a trial version you may want to look into.

http://www.sorensonmedia.com/

compressor should do a good job of this. use one of the presets that best fits your aspect ratio and your running time and you should be fine.

compressor should do a good job of this. use one of the presets that best fits your aspect ratio and your running time and you should be fine.

You would export with Compressor instead of Quicktime?
I am doing 4:3 ratio with 100 minutes of miniDV quality. The best preset would be NTSC 4:3, 120 minutes with Compressor, correct?

Thanks everyone for your help!

Don't export to Compressor directly from the timeline - Lewis has it right. I would export a QuickTime movie from the timeline using the current sequence settings (the default when you choose Export>QuickTime Movie). You can uncheck "Make Self-Contained" if you want to save disk space - that just makes a reference movie. Then put the QuickTime movie into Compressor. You could use the preset, but you will probably get a better encode if you make your own preset. For 100 minutes on a single-layer DVD-R, I would use 2-pass VBR encoding with an average rate of 5 Mbps and a max rate of 7.8 Mbps, and I would encode the audio in AC-3. For stereo use 192 kbps, and see this article for settings for the AC-3 codec: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/a_pack_warmouth.html.

Thanks for the info, Zach! Great!

Don't export to Compressor directly from the timeline - Lewis has it right. I would export a QuickTime movie from the timeline using the current sequence settings (the default when you choose Export>QuickTime Movie). You can uncheck "Make Self-Contained" if you want to save disk space - that just makes a reference movie. Then put the QuickTime movie into Compressor. You could use the preset, but you will probably get a better encode if you make your own preset. For 100 minutes on a single-layer DVD-R, I would use 2-pass VBR encoding with an average rate of 5 Mbps and a max rate of 7.8 Mbps, and I would encode the audio in AC-3. For stereo use 192 kbps, and see this article for settings for the AC-3 codec: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/a_pack_warmouth.html.
what quicktime movie export settings do you use? does it lose quality when it is compressed twice (quicktime + compressor)? this is all news to me. please explain.

A.J.,

It's not compressed twice when you export as a QuikTime Movie out of FCP. FCP just basically assembles your cuts, filters, transtions and audio into a single QT file in the same codec as your time line. In older versions of FCP this was called Export as Final Cut Movie (I still call them that actually). If you choose to make it a reference movie as opposed to self contained, then the resulting QT movie will refer back to your cuts and filter and transition data to play back a movie.

My work flow is this:

1. Make movie in FCP 5
2. Export as self contained QuickTime movie. This is how I archive my projects if they need no more editing.
3. Encode to MPEG2 with BitVice (http://www.innobits.se/). It will ask you if you want to save the audio track as an .aiff file, choose YES.
4. Encode .aiff as .AC3 file using a.pack. Refer to the article at kenstone.net that Zach linked to.
5. Import .m2v and .ac3 files into DVDSP 3 to author DVDs.