DVD Movie production in Widescreen

[Tony Sheppard]

It has been one of those weeks ..... our WebMaster (and alround dogs' body
when it comes to any digital productions) has been given the fantastic job
of producing promotional material for a Panasonic PT-50PHD4-P (1366x768
pixels).

The first lot of material has been produced in Keynote (and Keynote is very
good as far as we are concerned ... and hasn't crashed either :-)! ) and
exported to Quicktime using the Motion JpegA codec and is good quality. The
resolution is 1366x768, at 25fps

After trying with iMovie and iDVD and realising that the quality is not
going to be good enough, mainly due to the stretching of the movie to fit
4:3 used by iMovie / iDVD. So we have tried FCPro (in a custom sequence of
1366x768 to allow for the full quality of the movie) and DVDSP, but finding
that on outputing to MPEG-2 (which it outputs it at 720x480) the quality is
not good enough quality for management.

My main questions are ....
1. Looking to do this sort of production are we using the right tools?
2. How can we output to MPEG-2 at the needed resolution? Third party codec?
If so what would people recommend?
3. Are there any good tutorials for producing Widescreen DVDs?
4. We are utterly confused as to what size as to do the stills (using
Photoshop) and for sequences in general for FCPro?

We are a UK based school but the DVD player does PAL and NTSC, but
information for PAL would be best.

Tony Sheppard