Max Quality for DVD creation from DV in FCP 3

[Van G]

Hello All,

My first post, but I've got a lot of meat for consideration!

We have a 73 min snow action movie that was created in Final Cut Pro 3. Film has a lot of motion on a lot of white sences as you would think for snowboarding and skiing in the backcountry.

I am trying to encode the DV footage (720 x 480) which is letterboxed 1:1.16. My goal is to have the best possible encoding! Time to encode isn't an issue. The end piece will be used in DVD Authoring App and laid off to DLT for duplication.

I am a proficient user on both Mac and PC, but have always preferred doing the meat and potatoes work on my PC.

My first three attempts to encode produced reasonable results, all of them on the PC. I exported a Hi Res FCP Movie (QT) and then took it in on my PC. I then encoded with Cleaner 5 (DVD Wizzard), TMPGEnc 2.5 Plus (with QT add-on) DVD NTSC VBR 7000KBPS Template.

The Cleaner 5 encoding was better than the TMPGEnc . TMPGEnc produced poor titling with shifted pixels and not as smooth an image. I feel that both the encodings are noticeably degraded.

So my questions/comments are as follows:

- From FCP 3, how can I export the best possible file to work with for encoding? Or should I be using the DVD Studio Pro MPEG 2 export and work on the MAC?

- The file I worked with is a Hi Res FCP Export. When I opened the file with CCE 2.64 Trial it told me that it was 6000KBps CBR (16.4 GB file). Can I export a lossless file from FCP?

- What are my options for the best video encoding? Audio encoding? I've done some reading on CCE but would like to know this is the right choice before blowing 2K!!!!! What do pro shops/duplication houses encode our d-beta tapes with? Can I do as good a job as them?

These are my issues if the forum has time to look and respond, I have more than enough energy to respond and try different solutions.

[Baldrick]

one topic is enough
http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=118282&highlight=

even though you may use mac and pc.