Don’t you just love encountering obstacles along those unfamiliar roads that we filmmakers seem to travel on a fairly regular basis. I recently shot a film using the Canon XH-A1 set to 1080i60. I hadn’t used the camera much and due to the tight deadlines had little time to run any tests integrating the camera with Apple’s Final Cut Pro 6.0 and then outputting via Compressor and DVD Studio Pro. Boy was I in for a fun little challenge. Apart from issues capturing the footage (which will be addressed in another article), authoring to DVD became quite the learning experience.

Once I had completed the final edit, I figured the rest would be a piece of cake; export a self-contained Quicktime Movie, pop it into Compressor using the “DVD: Best Quality 90 Minute” folder preset, send the files to DVD Studio Pro, throw a simple menu together and Badaboom I have an amazing standard definition DVD that looks just as good as anything Universal or Disney could author. So I go through the process, my computer shoots out a DVD, I pop it in my cheap home DVD player and the video looks like a compression nightmare. The image was so pixelated I thought maybe I accidentally checked the “super duper low quality” check box in during one of the exports. Anyway, I quickly ran back to my computer checked my settings and everything seemed to indicate the quality was good, but a second attempted returned the same results.

At that point I began the painful process of trying different settings in each stage of the process. It took probably, 4 days of experimentation before I finally found something that worked. So to make a long story short here is what I did:

Step 1

From Final Cut I exported the final sequence as a Quicktime Self-Contained Movie. Using the following settings:

Exporting a Quicktime Movie from Final Cut Pro

Export Quicktime Movie - The "Save" Dialog Box Settings

Step 2

From there I took the Quicktime file generated by FCP and opened it in Quicktime Pro. In QT Pro I exported the file once again, this time to a 1280 x 720 deinterlaced Quicktime file.

Export from Quicktime Pro

Export from Quicktime and Choose Options

In the export dialog box I clicked on the options button to change the video settings and size, and the sound settings. Below are the settings I used:

Movie Settings in the Export Options for Quicktime

in the Export Options for Quicktime in the Export Options for Quicktime

Export Size Settings in the Export Options for Quicktime

Sound Settings in the Export Options for Quicktime

Step 3

In Compressor I used the MPEG-2 compression under DVD Best Quality for the 90 minutes since the video was less that 90 minutes. For my audio I used AIFF 48:24 although I wonder if 48:16 would have given me the same results. The file size is bigger than the Dolby 2.0 AC3 in the DVD folder, but the quality was noticably different from the AC3. For the distribution copy I did AC3 because I noticed that when I tried to play the DVD on in Windows Media Player the sound was 90% noise and absolutely horrific.

Compressor DVD Presets

Additional Compressor DVD Audio Presets

From there I imported into DVD Studio Pro and went to work as usual, authoring the final project to DVD. In DVD studio Pro I noticed that adding drop shadows to the text helped reduce pixelation in the application generated text. I seems the best solution to the pixelation is to generate all element in external applications like Photoshop and Motion and then import them into DVD Studio Pro.

What a bugger.