iDVD3 quality issues

[George Robertson]

Many thanks to sb, Erica Sadun, and Jim Heid for replying to my 
concerns about quality. I was delighted that people whose work I have 
admired for some years had taken the trouble to reply. And I'm glad to 
hear Compressor in FCP 4.0 will be an improvement (I bought FCP 4.0 a 
few weeks ago but have cracked the box only today, waiting until this 
last project was finished.) It's valuable to know that if I intend to 
use Compressor, I'll need to use DVD Studio Pro as well. Ouch. Oh, well.

However, in one sense, one of your answers confused me. To save space 
in my original message, I omitted to say that before burning the DVDs I 
spoke of, I had burned a few using the very method that you recommend, 
that is, exporting the FCP file as a QuickTime file, with the 
"standalone" feature unchecked. The result of this was a greater 
degradation of the image than what I finally ended up with, exporting 
the file as a DV Stream. I had found a few sentences in Bob LeVitus's 
The Little iDVD book (p. 86), in which he says, "You'll get the best 
results if you export your video in the DV stream format," and then in 
a breakout paragraph, he says, "For the best results, Apple recommends 
using a video frame rate of 29.97 frames per second, no compression for 
audio, and an audio rate of 48kHz." I believe these choices are not 
available if you export as QuickTime (although they may be the same as 
"Best quality"). Anyway, this is what I did, and it was indeed an 
improvement, but still left me with the feeling that I had somehow 
missed something, or I had simply run up against some of the 
limitations of iDVD. I don't want to set expert against expert, but I 
wonder if you could comment on this?

Jim Heid confirmed my suspicions that I did "too much" in making a tape 
of the finished project and then capturing it back into FCP. I was 
forced into this expedient because the drive containing all the media 
was nearly full, and I knew that the newly-captured file would be 12 or 
13 gigs instead of the 40 that represented all the original media, 
render files, music clips, etc. At that point I knew I had to say 
goodbye to any last-minute changes. Could this unnecessary recapture 
have introduced a generation loss in quality, even though it wasn't 
perceptible to me?

Thanks again, I keep learning things.

George