exporting

alright, so i just finished my first full length snowboard film and have no idea how to export it. my premiere is on wednesday night here in portland and i need to get this thing out. do i use compressor or what? i have only ever exported for web. never for a dvd. the film is about 20 minutes long. also half of the film is hd and its all widescreen. can someone please give me some settings? it would be much appreciated.

thanks,
keaten

It's actually not that complicated. First of all, what are you using to burn to video DVD? If you're using iDVD, you can forget about Compressor -- it won't do you any good since iDVD doesn't accept MPEG-2s last I checked. So Render All (OPTION-R), Audio Mixdown (OPTION-APPLE-R), and then just do an Export - QuickTime Movie. I recommend making the movie file self-contained. Drag the resulting full-quality movie file into iDVD and burn.

For Compressor, you can simply use one of its DVD presets -- your film is 20 minutes, so you should be able to use the highest-quality setting, which should be 90 minutes. (Anybody else miss the 60-minute presets? Or am I a bit behind on Compressor presets and they've already put it back?) Those presets should give you an MPEG-2 for the video, an AC3 file for the audio, and (depending on your version of Compressor) an AIFF of the audio. You don't need both the AC3 and the AIFF. Drag those into DVD Studio Pro and Build/Format.


www.derekmok.com

>an AC3 file for the audio,

There are 2 additional things to do to ensure that Compressor doesn't mess with your mixed audio. There's a setting for dialnorm in the .ac3 preset, I think it's set to -18dBs on default. Toggle that to -31dBs to turn off dialnorm. In one of the next tabs, there's a setting at "film standard compression". Toggle that to "no compression".



www.strypesinpost.com

thanks for the responses. as for right now i am using idvd. the guy that is working on the dvd menu isn't done yet. so i just need to print off a copy for this premiere. so when i am using quicktime to export i keep having issues. it won't print off as widescreen. what am i doing wrong? i tried a few different things. i went into custom settings and clicked anamorphic 16:9 and still it won't export as widescreen. what do i need to do to make it widescreen? What should the height and width be?

>i went into custom settings and clicked anamorphic 16:9 and still it won't export as widescreen.

I'm not familiar with iDVD, but in DVDSP (which should work fairly similarly), widescreen (16:9 FHA), is defined by an anamorphic flag. That flag will be read by the DVD player on playback which will then letterbox on-the-fly if it is played out on a 4:3 tv.

In iDVD, check if there is a track or import setting that you can select "16:9 letterbox".



www.strypesinpost.com

used to be, and may still be, that iDVD would only read the anamorphic flag of an iMovie export.

SO...

you have to drop your FCP export onto a little droplet-type application called "Anamorphicizer"
[homepage.mac.com]

the file would than read as 16/9 anamorphic in iDVD.


nick

i got it figured out. thanks guys. i just needed to change some settings in quicktime. the dimensions cause for some reason it doesn't recognize it. weird? however will this be fine playing on a 7 by 10 foot screen? its being projected. i am just a little worried it won't look so sharp. i played it on a pretty big screen today and it kinda got a little pixelated looking. i don't know if it was the projector getting dirty or the film. just making sure everything goes well for this premiere. thanks for all the help.

keaten