Getting good quality DVDs from HD material

Make sure each track (or the only track) is set to 16:9 as well by selecting it and looking at the settings in the inspector. If they are set properly there, I would double check your TV settings.

Jeremy

They are correct meaning 16:9, however when further checking the source video exported from FCP, and in FCP timeline, the video is also short & fat there... so my downconverted HDV video from camera to FCP capture & timeline viewer has squashed the aspect ratio.

When I view the video in FCP viewer it is short & Fat, as well as the exported QT(which is the same as when I burned a DVD widescreen). After realizing this, I had to export from FCP using the DV NTSC 48 hz, rather than the anamorphic setting, now I have a "true" aspect ratio, but it's back to old 4:3 ratio that cropped off each side!!! and I shot in HDV 16:9, should I be downconverting "Squeeze" rather than "edge crop" from the camera settings?

What is the proper FCP export setting(or conversion) to QT to keep the proper 16:9 aspect ratio that does not look squashed?(so I can burn 16:9 DVD that doesn't look squashed) or am I supposed to downconvert from camera differently?

Is it better to capture HD in FCP, edit HD then downconvert as you export from FCP? or do the downconvert from camera to FCP as I have already done?

All the video I shoot in SD widescreen works fine, however the HDV convert to SD has this problem... Please advise?

Thanks!

I'm looking for the same answer.

I also have some HD content, can produce Blu-Ray with it, but also want to produce DVD versions of the same edit. the iDVD produced video is, as you point out, pretty bad. In my case I notice it particularly in the titling (which happens to be the first thing people see, so you really want it to look good) which displays lots of compression artifacts. So one crisp HD titles now look like they've been done with a smudge stick.

I've found a partial solution. If you use the File -> Export -> Using QuickTime Conversion ... option from Final Cut Express you can set the exported movie to a 480P format (e.g. DV/DVCPRO, DVCPRO50) and get a movie that can be rendered pretty well in iDVD.

However, if you've got chapter/scene selection data in your timeline it is lost.

I've been searching for a way to find out what down conversion settings iDVD is using and see if they can be set to what I can get out of FCE and QuickTime Conversion.

c.

Does anyone know how to correctly burn HD captured video(1440x1080i) on standard DVD in widescreen ratio, without having video that looks short and dumpy????
Please advise?