New to FCP and having difficulty compressing HD footage

I have a MacBook Pro 2,1 with 3gb Memory and 2.33 MHz processor.
We filmed on a Sony Z1U HD camera. I captured using Apple Intermediate Codex 108050i and sent it to my external hard drive (500GB).
Capture went fine and the picture and audio are a lock, however since the laptop screen is not 'true color' I am having trouble with my color correction (mainly the lead's face is blotchy purple when exported).
The other problem is that I can't seem to find a compression format that keeps the quality of the picture, can be recognized by both iDVD and DVD studio Pro, and lays down into a picture that can be read by the average DVD player.

Urg. Very frustrating.

Any help would be appreciated.
Did I mention that I have about 10 film festival deadlines coming up on Friday? :-)

Thanks in advance!
Carolyn

You need to connect an external monitor to do colour correction. This is no different to any NLE.

Don't do any compression before going to iDVD or DVDSP. Just export a quicktime movie (not quickime conversion) and drop this into either program, and let it do the compressing.

Thanks, I am trying that now.

Check out the Matrox MXO. That in combination with the Apple Cinema Display, or Dell 2407 LCD will get you broadcast colors. VERY nice box.

And it works with the MacBook Pro and HDV footage. It is the only output option you have for the MacBook, actually. All the other HD cards are internal PCIx or PCIe cards meant for towers. the MXO connects via DVI.


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Thanks for the info on Matrox MXO.

I just tried exactly that (actually I was pretty sure I had done that before, but I wanted to be sure). The resulting film is very blurred with artifact strobing and ghosting. Very unappealing.

Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance!
Carolyn

Well there's a couple things..

Are you in a PAL country? because you said you shot PAL video and having iDVD do your NTSC framerate conversion can look very nasty...Gramme Nattress has a nice plug-in for that....

Also, i suggest doing your downconversion and compression before hand, although then you must use DVDSP. Take the Exported QT and drop it in Compressor and choose the appropriate pre-set, one of the 16x9 to DVD features and select one that fits your movie length. Take the .M2v and the associated audio and drop them into a DVDSP template and connect a few buttons and you're good to go...Also, you can tell it whether to letterbox or display as anamorphic in Studio Pro as well. It;s def an app worth learning

Again, Studio Pro will have the same issues if your feeding PAL video into an NTSC system. You can probably convert to a 24p to get a good film look...again, Nattress is the way to go