Exporting feature film - best quality?

>What would be the best quality to export my feature film

The best way to export depends entirely on your delivery method. There is no single export method that is best for all forms of delivery (file playback, web, DVD, etc). FZor example, DVD is standard definition only and therefore the web or file playback delivery methods will yield much higher resolution than DVD.

Also note that you'll probably have better results with the title scrolling if you had used the Boris Title Crawl text generator that came bundled with FCE.

-DH

A few responses, hopefully they are illuminating and possibly also helpful

"Best Quality" has a subjective aspect to it. If you mean, "as close to my original footage as possible", then export to QuickTime Movie, not QuickTime Conversion. And if you are sending the video to iDVD, export to QuickTime Movie only.

If you are using Final Cut Express, your HDV material has already been transcoded to QuickTime/Apple Intermediate Codec. That's how FCE works with HDV video. If you simply export your sequence to QuickTime Movie, you will get a file that is QuickTime/Apple Intermediate Codec.

You cannot export from FCE to ProRes. FCE does not support ProRes.

If your video is HDV it should already be 16:9; there is nothing further you need to do to ensure it is 16:9.

The lines on your TV screen could happen from many causes. It's not necessarily your video, although if the lines are fairly consistent throughout the entire video, it could be from the interlaced nature of the video, a bad export or a bad encode & burn. Try the following as a test:

• In FCE, do Sequence > Render All > Both, followed by Sequence > Render Only > Mixdown.
• Then save your project.
• Then export to QuickTime Movie (self-contained or not, it doesn't matter for this test).
• Then import the video into iDVD.
• In iDVD make sure your Encoding preference is set to Professional Quality.
• Then complete & burn your DVD. See if that makes a difference.

iDVD will take care of the necessary encoding to burn your video to DVD. The important measure is the length in time of your video. You can fit up to about 2 hours on single-layer DVD media; about 4 hours on dual-layer DVD media. The filesize of the QuickTime file that you export from FCE/import into iDVD is irrelevant.

For a 140 minute video, you should be using a dual-layer DVD disc.

Just jumping in here to say this discussion is very helpful. I have a similar thread on-going right now. Thank you, Martin and David.