FCPX - Compressor - DVD Authoring Workflow - Help

First, I need to say that I still do 90% of my work in FCS. Although I'm intrigued by FCPX and using it more and more, I have a whole lot of learning ahead. There are a lot of people on the FCPX boards who are using it as their primary editor…and you may get more informed advice over there.

But to your workflow questions, I think I would see if your system can handle optimized media (Pro Res) rather than Proxy. I just did a two camera shoot and had no trouble cutting in Pro Res – with the media on a FW 800 external drive. Then I followed my usual workflow: after finishing, export as a QT movie with current settings so that I have a Pro Res master that I can bring into Compressor to re-purpose for DVD, Web, Broadcast, Mobile Devices.

As to your specific DVD needs, you probably already know that Compressor can output DVD's with a simple menu that respects chapter markers that are set within Compressor (not FCPX). So there's only one encode: Pro Res > MPEG 2 plus AC3, which processes fairly quickly. Fair warning: there was a recent poster in this forum who had a boatload of trouble with a long video and over 20 chapters. I have not encountered those problems myself, but I don't believe he ever found a fix for his.

If you require a complex menu, then probably Encore is the way to go unless you have access to DVD Studio Pro. I would imagine that Compressor's markers would be recognized by Encore, but I'm not positive. They definitely are recognized by DVD Studio Pr – and for that matter, iDVD.

BTW, you state the video was shot 1080i…what is the significance of 1280X720? You know that all DVDs are 720X480.

Good luck.

Russ

Hety Dan.

Yup, afraid 720X480 is the DVD standard. Anything bigger is (nowadays) Blu-Ray. What are the other options?

Bring an HD file into Compressor and it "sees" it's 16x9 and converts your square pixels to an anamorhphic ratio. Done right (with proper re-scaling and compression choices) it will look great on an HD screen.

I don't know about Architecture, but I can appreciate the choice. Hopefully, you can set chapters that it can read.

AGain, good luck.

Russ

Hey Dan.

This discussion ofDVD Video may be helpful in developing an understanding of specs and how they might affect workflow decisions.

The general approach is to take an editing file that's encoded with a lot of information (like Pro Res) and then trancode it to a delievry file, encoded with a codec (like h.264 or MPEG-2) that relies on less information to approximate the original. The editing files are always huge compared to the delivery files.

Compressor - and other encoding apps – can take a 40 GB file and do the necessary compressions to fit it on a single layer disk. In the process, of course, one runs into limits, beyond which quality hits become noticable even to the most casual viewer.

I don't know how the Sony authoring app works. It's possible it does the down-scaling and MPEG-2 encoding and doesn't mind being fed a 1080 file. By way of comparison, iDVD is quite happy to do exactly that and IMO, does a very good job. However, I typically recommend to others what I do myself, which is tto downscale in Compressor. And while you indicate Architect wants a QuickTime file, I also don't know whether it will work well – or at all – with a Pro Res QT MOVIE.

WHy don't you "waste" a few disks by testing a small section of your movie? See how and whether Architect can do what you need and compare its quality to one that is created directly from Compressor.

Good luck.

Russ

This project is almost exactly like the one I just finished: school talent show, 3 cameras, DVD required. But only one of my cameras was HD. After some experimentation, I ended up settling on the Send to Compressor share option from FCP X, adding chapter marks in Compressor, and using Compressor to burn the DVD. Yes, I had to give up a fancier DVD menu, but my only other available option was iDVD which had great DVD menus but terrible video quality. As Russ indicated, DVD is not an HD format, so you won't be able to preserve your full HD resolution on a DVD.

BTW, I ended up splitting my project onto two DVDs, 1:15 each, so that I could keep the DVD quality high.

Hey Dan,

Hope this works with DVD Architect, but again – have no idea what are supported files formats in that app.Didn't have time to anything other than a cursory search, but didn't come up with supported file formats.

Feed it a test file and see what happens. If it doesn't work, I'd suggest iDVD …or ENcore on a Mac.

Best of luck.

Russ