Easiest way to add Chapter markers in FCP for iDVD

You export your movies from FCP. You take them to Compressor. Add the chapter markers there. Export from Compressor and take the files to iDVD. There are also third party apps that will simplify this. I think one is available in the App Store AVT Chapter It or https://github.com/rockwood/fcpx-Marker-Converter

Where are chapter markers created in Compressor? The Help Manual for Compressor says they are created in "Final Cut Pro" (sc. FCP 7, I suppose) and are "passed through" by Compressor. We know that FCPX doesn't have a chapter marker facility, and there are no other references in Compressor to Chapter Markers that I can find. Thanks for any guidance.

Are you using Compressor 4?

Yes, latest. I have meanwhile downloaded the AVT Chapterit software that you mentioned, which seems to work well.

If the manual says that, it's probably one of the v.3 manuals (I could check later).

Here's what the v.4 manual says about chapter markers.

But if the 3rd party app is working well for you, that's great.

Russ

Very helpful Russ. Thank you. It looks as if there are still bits of the v.3 manual hiding in the v.4 one. I didn't find the help section you set out, the first time I searched. Are there any quality differences, do you believe, between creating a DVD from a Pro Res file using Chapterit and iDVD on the one hand, and Compressor on the other?

I found there was a degrade in quality using iDVD to create an 80-minute DVD compared to Compressor. I found Compressor to produce the best quality DVDs (i.e. fewest compression artifacts), followed by FCP X, followed by iDVD. iDVD of course has the benefit of more DVD menuing options.

aleidy,

I am curious to knoiw which setting you used in iDVD, Best Performance, High Quality or Proffessional Quality ? I have foind that sometimes High Quality gives better results than I would get with Proffessional Quality.

Hey Caleb.

In my view, iDVD does a pretty nice job of handling whatever we throw at it. Over the years I've had some really high quality output with HD (many flavors) and SD input. It certainly does make a difference with whatever quality encode selection was chosen.

Compressor may (or may not) produce a higher quality disk. There are more controls and opportunities to improve things…and more opportunities to mess up. To my way of thinking the biggest benefit to using Compressor for making DVD's is frame controls, which especially can helpp in re-scaling frrom HD to SD. Also the ability to insert compression markers in problematic scenes.

My 2 cents: do some testing on your material. See how well differents settings treat your footage.

Good luck.

Russ

iDVD ALWAYS recompresses the video for DVDs. So you should give it the best quality input to start with. You cannot use Compressor to create MPEG2 streams because iDVD won't accept it.

Michigan One Fly,

I was using the Professional Quality setting in iDVD which resulted in poor quality compared to Compressor. Interesting that you had better results with High Quality. I'll give that a try next time I need fancy DVD menu options.

If you don't want to buy Compressor and deal with learning it you can also use AVT ChapterIt http://www.avt.scirius.com/ChapterIt.htm or SImpleMovieX http://simplemoviex.com/SimpleMovieX/index.var

I wanted to import my FinalCut X movies into iDVD with chapters and was looking for a simple solution. I ended up buying and using ChapterIt. It has some rough edges, but got the job done is a short time. I added chapters to two movies, one was 23 min 2 GB, the other 96 min 13 GB, with a total of about 20 chapters. It handled both but not before damaging one movie (it would not open Quicktime) but luckily I was working on a copy and could restart the process. I will be contacting the author so hopefully he will address the issues I came across.