Capturing and Exporting

[nikult626]

I have final cut studio 2, i'm shooting on a canon gl-2. What I wanted to know is, after i'm done editing. how should i put this on dvd, meaning what format? the dv codec looks like crap. i made a company logo in motion and it looked great, very crisp and i was impressed with myself. once i put it on dvd, it looked like crap, blunt colors, edges were faded and so was a lot of the flare of the animation, kind of like how vhs would look vs a dvd of the same movie. i know it shouldn't look like that, so obviously i didn't use the correct method of exporting to dvd from final cut pro or motion.

i just need someone with experience to tell me what is the proper way to put this on a dvd is so it looks the same way it does when i'm editing it. i understand the colors may not be EXACTLY the same due to differences in ntsc colors and editing on my lcd monitor but there's gotta be a trick to making it look similar to how i see it when editing the video. any help would be great!

 

[BenB]

Export straight to Compressor, use the DVD presets there as a starting point, and create your DVD assets there. It takes a real understanding of MPEG-2 and AC3 encoding to get good image quality on a DVD, since it is so very compressed.

Also, you can't trust your computer monitor to tell you what the true look of your video is. You have to have an external production monitor. Or baring that, hook a TV set to FCP via your GL-1, to see what it looks like on the interlaced screen with the limited color space it supports. But you can NEVER trust your computer monitor to tell you what that video footage actually looks like on a TV screen, just ain't gonna happen.

And color correction is very important. Learn it. Learn to use the scopes. It's not hard, and can make the world of difference in your final product.

I highly recommend the Apple Pro Training Series books. The Final Cut Pro 6 Beyond The Basics has a really great section on color grading and correction. The first Final Cut Pro 6 book covers a lot of very important information about image quality, etc, also.

I also have a tutorial DVD on DVD Studio Pro that goes through the whole process with Compressor, too.