Re: Best compression product

Okay, Daniel. My source content are videos that are, on average, about 12 minutes long. All of my videos are silent. I use FCP as my editing software, and about 95% of the clips consist of Shake-composited footage. I use lots of cross-dissolves and transitions between clips, too. In FCP the video is in animation format (since it's not lossy), set to 1920 x 1080 and 29.97.

When I've tried to export my animation file to Compressor to downconvert to SD, the quality was hideous, and some of the transitions didn't work. So I stopped trying that approach, and came up with a combination that works on my computer, at least, and looks great, and that fits onto a DVD:

I exported my animation file to Compressor, created a beautiful AppProRes(HQ) Interlaced file (approx. 22 GB). Then I imported that AppProRes .mov file into DVD Studio Pro, and converted that into an .m2v file, which I then burned onto a 4.74 DVD. To do all this, I used the settings recommended in Ken Stone's website, and I applied many of the workarounds listed in the Cow for dealing with the gamma shift issue in QT movies.

Although my decent-looking DVD file does not play on my standalone DVD player, it plays pretty well on my DVD Player on my Mac Pro. There is some very minor stuttering that I can live with in the DVD samples (but no seizing), and the color and resolution look pretty good. All of the transitions work properly, too.

Is there a way to achieve the same results with a Compressor SD file?