Re: Blur tranistion too much for Apple MPEG2?

I used to go strictly QT myself. I figured that by keeping everything QT (since that was what was being used to compress to MPEG2) things would be simpler. Not exactly the case.

I was noticing a little lower quality on my QT exports (and I was very careful with the settings) than with the FCP movies. Probably just the power of suggestion since I have heard many others complain about it. What I like best about FCP movie export is the fact that it apparently doesn't recompress (transitions being the victim in QT). This is evident by the sheer time difference.

I have been using self-contained FCP movies with iDVD2 for a while now and have had no problems. I use reference movies every now and then if I absolutely have to save the disc space but that doesn't come up too often. I prefer to use self-contained so I can delete all reference media and render files giving more space to move on to the next project.

As for the reference movies skipping I don't know the actual cause but if I had to speculate I would say it is because the source material is most likely scattered all over the disc(s). The QT MPEG2 encoder would have to look all over the place to locate the original media, not to mention any render files. That has to be taxing on the system and could very well lead to skipping problems. Logic dictates that if the encoder only had to look for one single streamed file it would run a lot smoother. Completely non-professional guessing on my part.

The best thing to do is experiment and see what works best for you.

Good luck.

allan