FCP to Compressor options

Hi,
New to FC Studio 3. I have a short (~3 minute) project in FCP that I want to put on DVD. It seems that the way I get the project into Compressor makes a huge difference in the compression time...
Option (1) Export rendered timeline as a QT reference file. That's basically instantaneous. Import into Compressor, set the DVD 90min best quality option and submit (to This Computer). Compression time = about 1 min 45 sec.
Option (2) Use FCP "Send to Compressor" on the rendered timeline. Set same compressions settings in Compressor. Compression time = about 7 minutes!
I can go with the flow and do option 1, but I'd like to understand why these two approaches take such different times. One way is using the multiple cores and the other not? Is this documented somewhere?
Thanks.
Martin

Can't tell you why, but the word on the street has always been to export to quicktime, then drop the qt file into compressor. It also gives the benefit of being able to edit with fcp while compressing, while workflow 2 doesn't.
When I was figuring this all out in the spring, it had to do with a bug in compressor. You couldn't get it to work with multiple cores by sending it to compressor from FCP. Snow leopard may allow you to use more cores, thus get it to work. They may have fixed the bug in Compressor 2, but my guess is that it doesn't allow the full use of all the cores.
You can test this by running activity monitor, and viewing the cpu usage in a separate window. It will show each core as a bar graph. if you have it set up right, each core should be nearly full. I have 16 cores, have set qmaster up to run 8 instances, and the graph shows almost all blue on the cpu graph.
Check it out both ways and let me know what you find out.
Ken

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