iDVD3 quality issues

[George Robertson]

I hope you'll bear with me. I am a little confused.

I have just completed a one-hour travel video in FCP 3.0, and 
subsequently burned several DVDs with iDVD3, using Mac System 10.2.3. 
The project accumulated over 40 gigs by the time I was ready to burn. 
The result is adequate but disappointing in one respect: the video 
quality comes close to the original DV footage, but reveals at times a 
gauzy pixellation in certain shots. I am wondering if this is a natural 
limit of the compression software, or if I have made some errors along 
the way.

Here are my steps:

1. When the project was finished on FCP 4.0, I transferred it back to 
DV tape. The tape quality looked identical to the original tape sources.

2. I then captured this one hour of tape back into a new FCP project 
file. It of course looked like the original tape. It occupied only 16 
gigs instead of 40.

3. Under File, I exported this as a "DV stream", and selected 48 kHz 
sound quality in stereo. This export took about three hours.

4. When this was finished, I opened iDVD and dragged the exported file 
on to its main window. I selected a theme and placed the title, etc., 
and then clicked on Burn.

5. The process of burning the DVD took just under an hour. The result, 
as I say, is close, but reveals a fine gauzy texture in some 
backgrounds, and a few artifacts in scenes with motion.

My questions are: did I needlessly complicate things, or degrade the 
picture, by making a DV backup of the project, and then encoding it 
from there, instead of from the original project? And is there a less 
lossy compression I can use within FCP and/or iDVD than the one I chose?

And finally, will I be able to achieve a higher quality final image 
from DVD StudioPro?

Thanks for any help.

George