Re: proffessional dvd authoring and duplication

I agree completely that Compressor / DVD SP isn't completely on par with professional grade products. A decent hardware encoder or a better software encoder (I believe several were mentioned, otherwise a quick search of the cow will yield great results) will beat them out every time. Personally, where I'm at, we've only touched Compressor/ DVD SP in an emergency, and other than that we use use a hardware encoder for everything. It just plain looks better in the end.

If you are working with those, though, definitely have Compressor do your conversion, not DVD SP. I hear quite a few of the Pros saying that you should shoot for around 6.5 CBR for the best quality.

Also, check out the preferences in DVD SP. You can tell it to either encode in the background, or encode on build. So if you are taking it to a post house, simply set it to encode on build and you won't have it sucking up valuable processor cycles while you're working.

Best of luck to you, and let us know what you end up doing in the end to get the best final product.