Exporting Question

Hello,

I've made my edits and am ready to export.
Ever since I've been using FCP I've been exporting to a Movie file.
And then I use that file when I burn to a dvd.

Is that the way to go? It works for me so I'm assuming that's the way to do it...

What version of FCP? The terminology changed from ver 3 to 4, which impacts what you mean by "Movie" file.

Ver 3 and before, your Export choices were "Final Cut Pro Movie File" or "Quicktime Movie". That first choice (FCP Movie) gives you full quality with no compression, exactly what you want to use for a DVD authoring program. The QT option offered lots of compression alternatives, but at the expense of quality.

Ver 4+ changed those choices to "Quicktime Movie" or "Quicktime Compression". Their purposes are exactly parallel to what I described above; now the "Quicktime Movie" is the full quality option.

What you are doing (I assume it's the first of the choices) is correct if you have a relatively short (under 60 min) movie and using iDVD. For longer ones it's often necessary to do some fancy compression to optimize quality vs. disk space.

For a real answer, you need to give more info, such as OS version, FCP version, QT version and what DVD program you're using.

Scott

Yep - I would aslo make your exported movie "self-contained" otherwise you are good to go...

Ben



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