Video making can be a glorious process, but it can also be the most frustrating thing you will do. The footage looks great on the computer, it brings tears to your eyes even after the 200th time of watching through the same 5 second clip. You go to burn it to a DVD, watch it and wonder what happened to your amazing footage. It brings you to tears all over again, but these tears are usually accompanied by pulling out massive chunks of hair. I can sympathize. It’s been almost a week and I’m still trying to get rid of compression artifacts on slow moving footage.

Let me try and make it easier on you and give you the necessary settings. I’ve captured footage from the Panasonic DVX100A into Final Cut Pro 6.

• Sequence Settings: DV-NTSC, Interlaced, 16:9
• Export: Using Compressor (Settings: Apple, DVD: Best Quality 90 minutes which will give you 2-pass, automatic 16:9 aspect ratio as an MPEG-2 file and accompanying audio)
• Let Compressor do its thing and then import files into DVD Studio Pro
• Build your menu
• Burn Away

Do not, and I repeat, do not use the Animation sequence setting in Final Cut Pro if you’re using standard video footage. You may thing you’re getting better quality, but regardless of anything you may think, it’s not worth the headache of dealing with highly uncompressed footage. Using the Animation codec will cause any changes to require rendering and it also bogs down Final Cut. Your text will look great on DVD if you use the previously mentioned workflow. In addition, when you run out a DVD to see how it looks, also test it on a few different DVD player/TV systems. We just discovered out TV is rather outdated in its ability to handle 24P slow-motion footage since it is an interlaced machine (one fix – only reduce speed by 80% when shooting and editing in 24P). It looks like we may have to upgrade the TV. Any excuse to get a new TV, right?

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