Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 1574)

Chapter 16 Exporting Sequences for DVD 223
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Using DVD Studio Pro
DVD Studio Pro can import either standard QuickTime movies or DVD-compliant
sources. When you import standard QuickTime movies, they are automatically encoded
to be DVD-compliant. The video is encoded as MPEG-2 at a quality determined by a set
of preference settings, allowing you more control over the quality than when using
iDVD. The audio is encoded as uncompressed AIFF. For details on exporting a
QuickTime movie for use in DVD Studio Pro, see “
Using iDVD ” on page 222.
For the most control over your source quality, you can use external applications, such
as Compressor, to encode your video and audio into DVD-compliant sources. This
makes it possible to import specialized video and audio, such as MPEG-1 video and
compressed Dolby Digital AC-3 audio.
For information on exporting a QuickTime movie, see “ Exporting a QuickTime Movie for
DVD Use ” on page 224. See the DVD Studio Pro documentation for details on
supported video and audio formats and information on importing your movies.
Using Compressor
Compressor is a high-speed video and audio encoding application that comes with
Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, and Motion.
Compressor can work as a standalone application to compress your movie before you
import it into DVD Studio Pro, or it can be integrated into the workflow of
Final Cut Pro. This integration makes transcoding faster and more convenient, and also
saves hard disk space by eliminating the need to export the media files before
processing them. It also leverages the video processing technology of Final Cut Pro to
do much of the work (therefore maximizing the quality of images that are encoded),
and avoids degradation that can occur from multiple compression and decompression
steps.
To use Compressor, you import your sources into a batch (which is done automatically
when you launch Compressor from within Final Cut Pro), choose one or more presets
that select the encoder to use and specify its settings, choose a destination and output
filename, and submit the batch for encoding.
Compressor also includes a preview window with a split screen feature that makes it
easy to compare the source video with the encoded video. It also contains a timeline
that shows marker types and positions, and allows you to add to or edit the markers
and choose the exact sections of video to encode.