Exporting long film to DVD Studio

Question

I am nearing completion of a documentary (105 minutes) in FCP 4. When I export to Quicktime I get a "general error" and the export fails.
When I export to Quicktime Compressed using default settings the export takes all day and produces a 8.2 Gig file.
Can anyone suggest fix for the standard QT export and/or a faster method of transferring to DVD Studio?

Answer 1

When I export to Quicktime I get a "general error" and the export fails.
What settings are you using to export?
To get the maximum quality, export your project to QuickTime using Current Settings, Self Contained. The result will be identical to the Sequence Settings in your Timeline.
Bring that file into Compressor. Use the DVD 120 minutes Best Quality setting. It will produce two files: a MPEG2 video and an ac3 audio. Import those into DVD SP and author your disc.
When I export to Quicktime Compressed using default settings the export takes all day...
Do you mean QuickTime Conversion? That method always recompresses the project -even if the settings are identical to your timeline settings. Not good because you are running it through an un-needed compression cycle that will reduce quality. The bare bones of a DVD are the MPEG 2 and ac3 files mentioned above.
....and produces a 8.2 Gig file.
8.2 GB is nothing in video. Buy more hard drive space. More to the point, what setting are you using that produces a file of that size with a run time of 105 minutes? It is actually far too small. If your footage was DV -the lowest quality that FCP works with, it should produce a file in the 20GB range.
Even if you let DVD SP do the compression, the important part is the running time, not the size in GB of your exported master. A standard DVD can comfortably hold two hours of video.
Check out this free widget to calculate the disk space needed for any editable video format:
http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/videospace