For the record, I'm not happy with ProRes

Question

Ever the optimist, I am now very discouraged. Even my downconverted HDV to DV footage looks better on a DVD than ProRes. I have read and re-read the many posts, especially the ones from Red Jacket Mike and Ben Low and the detailed and excellent responses. I feel I have followed them all, and done sample tests ad nauseum. I know a SD DVD won't look as good as the original footage, but it has to look better than this.
My set-up:
MacPro Dual 3 Ghz, OS 10.4.11, FCP6.0.2, QT 7.3.1, 5GB Ram, App on boot drive, lots of internal storage for media drive
Capture as ProRes via AJA IoHD into ProRes sequence. Main monitor is 30" apple display, and monitor 23" second monitor via Matrox MXO. Footage looks fabulous, as does the footage played from the camera.
The SD DVD use 2-pass best standard settings. Have tried both exporting directly to compressor and making QT file first and then importing that into compressor.
All the resulting DVD's with ProRes have a barely perceptible but annoying 'stuttering' quality to them.
I appreciate any suggestions. I have always had excellent success with FCP but this is really discouraging.
Thanks.
Sharon

Answer 1

I am very grateful for the comments. Thank you.
<+Are you doing any type of conversions - other than resizing down - while going out to MPEG-2? Retiming, maybe?+>
Not that I know of.
I file info shows the imported ProRes clips are 29.97, a test on importing as HDV shows them as 29.97.
When I looked at the camera settings, they are set to record at HDV 1080i and further settings show interlaced, scan type 60. My other choices for scan type are 24, 24A, and 30.
Compressor is set for 16:9. I have 2 projects:
The highlight version is 10 min. long. Encode in compressor at 7mbps. Other settings are:
NTSC
Frame rate 29.97
aspect ratio: 16:9
Field dominance: top
2 pass VBR, avg 7.0, max 8.6
Motion Estimation: Best
Frame controls: OFF
The 1hr. 15 min. version has the difference of:
avg bit rate 6.0, max 8.0
Do those settings seem reasonable?
I have not tried the CBR. I will try that. Thank you.
The compressor-created .m2v doesn't look that bad in QT player. I take the VIDEO_TS AND AUDIO_TS folders that DVDSP builds and burn those in Toast to make the DVD. Tried burning directly from DVDSP after your comment and didn't seem to make that much difference.
Am off to try the CBR suggestion now.
Thanks again.
Sharon