SOLUTION: Are you having problems using HDV in FCP X and iDVD?

If you edit HDV (TAPE) in FCP X and want to burn the video in iDVD you will find the following problem . . . iDVD squashes the image as shown in the screenshot below.

Whether you export as ProRes or H.264, iDVD will see it like this as a squashed image.

This is because iDVD does not recognise HDV anamorphic images unless they are in the Apple Intermediate Codec.

There are 2 solutions to this problem:-

1. Create a ProRes 422 Custom Compressor Preset with a frame size of 1920 x 1080.

The only downside to this is that the conversion process in my 2008 iMac takes about 5 times realtime.

2. Create an Apple Intermediate Codec preset for HDV. This encodes on my iMac in around realtime, so it is at least 4 times faster than the ProRes solution.

Unfortunately, if you have Compressor 4 you cannot create Apple Intermediate Codec presets, but Compressor 3.5 will and what is more important, that preset can be installed in Compressor 4.

So you can export your HDV project from FCP X using Compressor Presets in either ProRes or AIC and use the resulting file in iDVD to get a correctly proportioned image like this.

I prefer to use the AIC preset as it is 4 times faster and there is no quality difference on the final DVD.

What do you do if you haven't got Compressor 3.5 or 4?

Well you can email me for a 12KB copy of the preset as I believe FCP X can use it even though you don't have Compressor.