Burning DVDs with External Burner, not iDVD

I'm on a 1GHz G4 eMac, 512 MB SDRAM, using FCP 4.5. I do use Compressor for MPEG-1 compressions, but I don't have iDVD, just Toast 6 and an external DVD burner.

Can someone please tell me how to properly compress a DVD and then burn it? Thanks to all.

If you mean a DVD for movies, then you need to use MPEG-2 encoding. That is the only thing that will play on a set top DVD player. I am led to believe that Toast 7 has some magic encode capabilities, but have never used them. iDVD or DVD Studio Pro can build DVD's with proper menus.

Use Compressor to encode the video to Mpeg-2 (not mpeg-1). Then in Toast select "DVD-Video" from the "Video" tab. Drag in your Mpeg-2 video file and corresponding aiff audio file. There may be an option in Toast (if you have Toast Titanium) to create a menu for the DVD, but I have never used that and have no idea if it is any good. For a straight dvd of your video that will simply play when inserted in a dvd player, make sure the "Auto-play items" box is checked.

Hope that helps

pete

Pete,

Thanks for the great advice. But I've got lots of choices in the MPEG-2 compressor - which one is best for let's say an hour-long project? A ten-minute project?

The "Mpeg-2 60min High Quality" preset setting will work well for anything 60 minutes or less. For more than an hour of video, use the "90 min" or "120min" setting, accodingly.

pete