Re: 5 minute video onto a DVD

[Chris Blair] "Compressor is sort of a swiss army knife of compression...doing a lot of things moderately well, but none really well. "

Chris, how can you make a statement like that if you don't use Compressor? What about the optical flow technology that is built into Compressor but can only be activated if you know what buttons to push? That's like me saying that PC's are kind of like the swiss army knife of computing...doing a lot of things moderately well, but none really well; while this may or may not be true, I'm sure someone would disagree.

Back to business...

Matt, remember that DVD is basically 1 resolution no matter what your source material is: 720 x 480. (We could argue that 720 x 480 16:9 is Anamorphic and the alternative is to lay the material down at letterboxed 720 x 404 but we'll leave this for discussion at a later time.) The point is that your 1920 x 1080 material is being resized.

For a better looking product, I would suggest resizing your footage before creating your MPEG2 file. Your best bet is to use ProRes as your intermediate codec. It will assure a fast (but large file size) workflow.

Drop your Job (source) in your batch window ->
Apply a ProRes for Interlaced material Preset on to your Job (search in the text box if you can't see it) ->
Highlight your Job Settings in the Batch Window (if it's not already highlighted) ->
Select the Frame Controls Pane in your Inspector Window (3rd button from the left) ->
Turn Frame controls on if it's not on already (if everything is greyed out you need to click the button to the right of the Frame Controls drop-down box and select "On" when the drop-down becomes active) ->
Select the Geometry Pane in your Inspector Window (5th button from the left) ->
Set your frame size to 720 x 480 and make sure that the Pixel Aspect is set to NTSC CCIR 601/DV ->

Now the new correctly sized ProRes file that you're about to create should be the source for your DVD encoding.

If you want to get really fancy then just apply a couple more steps: bear with me here...

Make sure that your Job Settings are highlighted in your Batch Window ->
Click Job on the Menu at the top of your screen ->
Select New Job with Target Output ->

This will create a new Chained job based on the output from your last job! You should be seeing a chain link in your preview and as your icon for the new job, right?

Now find your DVD Best Settings folder and drag the folder to the new Chained Job ->
Before submitting you can change the name of your new DVD output files; I would suggest you erase the settings name applied for the audio and video files. When creating your DVD the Audio and Video name need to exactly match such as: MyMovie.ac3 and MyMove.m2v

Click SUBMIT!

This should get you on your way. If you've made it through these steps you're halfway to becoming a Compressor Expert.

Let us know how this turns out.
Thanks.