FCPX and iDVD: Quality and Exporting and Burning

DVD's are by their nature problematic. They are highly compressed (to fit on a 4+ GB disk) and they are SD – a fraction of the resolution of your beautiful HD movie. To add insult to injury, down scaling from HD to SD tends to introduce artifacts.

The commercial DVDs we admire are produced with very expensive equipment and from video that was shot with great lenses and shot by expert shooters.

The best quality you can get is a Quick Time file - played directly from your computer or from the Web.

If you need a disk format, FCP will output a simple DVD – that is, single track, no fancy menus. But the quality is good.

iDVD should be able make a decent quality DVD with much more authoring capability. Export a Pro Res master file to give iDVD a video file that contains as much detail as feasible. If you can, choose the Professional encoding setting.

FCP will also create simple Blu Ray disks if you have a Blue Ray burner. The quality should be much better than DVD. (There is also AVCHD disks, which FCP can make using a regular DVD burner. Like Blu Ray, it needs to be played back on a Blu Ray-supported device. AVCHD disks can only be up to about 30 minutes long.)

Good luck.

Russ

Why don't you edit the original 24p media? You do not want to convert it to 60i.

iDVD is of course standard definition so it will never look as good.

If the camera shoots 1920x1080 (and not 1440x1080) you should be able to take the exported file directly from FCP to iDVD.

" I've been getting a static-y look"

Another thing to check is the iDVD Project Properties.

Make sure the video standard is set correctly to match your footage.

Al

christopherfromwhippany wrote:

... How do I get "movie" quality videos? .. at a setting of HD1080/24p ..

common misunderstanding,that 24p gives automatically a 'movie look' .-..

24fps because, aside tradition, it would allow some very slow shutter speed; which creates motion blurr, one of the main ingrendience of 'movie look'. 2nd, light. Setting light. Compose dynamic ranges. Compose DoF. Compose framing. etc etc etc.

reg. iDVD:

as other mentioned before, simple export a 'Master file' = proRes, drop that into iDVD. For max quality, length of all content (=means, incl. menus, extras, etc) has to be <60min. Then iDVD uses max. standard supported bitrate of 9mbps.

If your source material fullfills high standards in photography, and you avoid any 'lossy in-beteweens', iDVD should result in excellent disks - although, in SDef only, DVD was never 'fullHD' .. 😁

christopherfromwhippany wrote:

Blu Ray may be the answer but I've learned much from burning now, thank you. Do you recommend anything other than iDVD?

If you don't need multiple tracks and sub menus, try Share>DVD or Blu Ray directly from FCP.

Or check out Roxio Toast if you want Blu Ray.

Russ

Please give the exact specs of the files you're exporting from FCP? What are the FCP project properties exactly?

Don't burn discs in iDVD. Make disc images and test them. If they work you can burn them to a DVD using Disk Utility.

christopherfromwhippany wrote:

... just coming up with audio and no video...thoughts?

educated guess: your Project settings are proRes4444 ... 😁

christopherfromwhippany wrote:

So I was supposed to export in proRes444 ...

told you how?

again:

Why not answering Tom's question - source format, project settings, export settings?

... and proRes4444 was a GUESS based upon your 'a yes, v no' results ..

using 4444 is completely nonsense ... that is a 'transport'-codec for hq-video with alphas/transparencies ...

And I'm not surprised, 8y old iDVD doesn't support such a 'high tech' format ...

Karsten Schlüter wrote:

educated guess: your Project settings are proRes4444 ... 😁

Good "guess", Karsten I didn't know PR 4444 isn't supported. HQ, does work, if anyone is intereted.

Russ