OT: FCP and Sony DVD Direct burner?

Hi there,

Was wondering if anyone here owns or has used any sort if external direct DVD recorder? And if yes, have they used it w/ FCP?
I am looking for a way to try and cut down on the endless hours I waste each week compressing and burning various versions of edits to DVD to give to my clients for "approval".
Sony for example offers a few reasonably priced direct DVD burners that have Firewire, so is it conceivable that I could play right off my FCP timeline and into the burner and record live, or at the least go through a deck and then to the burner? Obviously if the quality and playabllity of discs burned direct are an issue it would make moot any time saved, so am hoping for an opinion on anyone who has used consumer-level direct burners.

thanks,
Pete

Pete-

I have a couple of Liteon burners that I bought for cheap at a box store. I never had luck with firewire direct, but using analog inputs works fine.

Keep in mind that the compression is real-time, so it is not the best. I use them for check disks or reference records only. For those purposes they are fast and cheap.

-Vance

I use an AJA IO for most of my work, but I have successfully run the Firewire out of my G5 and into my GVD-1000 and then out to my Pioneer 223 external DVD recorder, and it works like a charm. It is a two stage process - you burn the disk and then you finalize it. A ten minute video will take an additional 4 minutes to finalize...WAY faster than the way I used to do it. Interestingly, the longer the video you are recording, the shorter the time to finalize. (I recently did a half hour infomercial direct to the recorder and it took 1 minute to finalize it).



"I'm just a Simple Cave Man Lawyer. Your world frightens and confuses me." - Phil Hartman

Thanks for the info both of you, I guess it confirms my initial thoughts that burning direct might be a cheap and quick way to run off quick demos when quality is not as big of a concern as speed and turnaround time. Anything that can allow me to NOT be at the mercy of the molassas-like speed of Compressor will come in handy.

Best
pete

I have used the Sony Direct drives and they work as advertised. They are picky about media - mine worked fine with Ritek DVD+R 8x (burning at 4x speed)