Will exporting project as Quicktime movie for dvd be just as good as compressor

[Arif Syed]

Compressor is giving me the Unknown Time Error and none of the "fixes" are working for me. Will exporting as quicktime movie and importing into DVD Studio be just as good as using Compressor and adding the targets? Or will I see a degradation of quality?

[Mark Andersson]

Hi Arif,

First:
What codec are you working with and how long is the running time? If it is HDV then go through Compressor.

A general rule is if its under 50 mins or so and you don't want to deinterlace or change the frame rate etc then DVD SP will be fine.

[Craig Parkes]

DVD Studio has it's own encoding settings under Preferences, these are limited compared to compressor but you can tweak them to get much better results than the defaults, so if you have to encode using DVD studio and quality is your benchmark than changing these (the key being to set them to a 2-pass encode and appropriate bitrate) will help a lot over the defaults.

Compressor will still generally do a better job on the whole, or at least provides you with much more tools to do a better job (the much over looked truth of the matter is that the quality encodes require expertise from the person in front of the computer as much or even more so than the software inside the computer - from the computers end it's all just math, how that maths is applied is up to the user.)

So have a look under the hood of DVD Studio's preferences and get your encoding settings to your liking there, and you may be ok to go without compressor.

Also, Mark has said your export codec from Final Cut as a quicktime will also impact upon quality - it's a whole workflow thing.

[Sherif Choudhry]

Arif, I would suggest you read this thread, its perfect in its response on why Compressor is more than capable of the best renders (but at the expense of speed).

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/final-cu...ml#post1487088

[Chris Korrow]

Are you going to compressor from the timeline, or from a self contained movie?