iDVD3 quality issues

[sb]

The workflow would be:

Capture everything,
edit rough cut
Use Media Manager to clear off unused media from the HD

Capture additional material

Either MM to clear off more HD space or

Finish Editing,

In FCP-4, use Export to QuickTime (not QuickTime Conversion)
(In FCP-3 use Export to Final Cut Pro movie)
Make sure the settings are DV-NTSC 48kHz (assuming you're Sequence Settings
are set to DV-NTSC 48)

Export FCP ref movie or self contained (no compression-decompression is
added)

Drag or import the FCP movie into iDVD3

As for the Bob LeVitus book, was he referring to an iMovie project?
Because iMovie works with DV Stream and that would make sense.
 
FCP works with DV codec and I have read several posts from FCP gurus that
all say exporting using the FCP ref movie is exactly the same as the movie
within FCP. It simply copies the file.

(gurus Philip Hodgetts, Adam Wilt, Tom Wolsky)

 sb

On 8/7/03 8:52 PM, "George Robertson" <gcrobert at shaw.ca> wrote:

> 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