Need some hand-holding and bullet point direction

Question

ok, i need some help. We shoot our church services on Sony PDW-700 HD XDCAMS. We shoot in 420 HQ (whatever that is). Once we finish shooting the service, we pull the source video off of the XDCAM disk using the Sony XDCAM transfer utility. I believe we end up with a .mls file. We then edit the source and send it to compressor and then to DVD studio pro and it gets burned to a standard DVD. What we end up with is a video with artifacts in it. What I mean by artifacts is wavy lines around the edges of movement.
What I need to know, from step 1 to step whatever, is HOW to get the source from FCP to DVD w/out artifacts. It seems that we should be able to produce a DVD that looks better than ours and w/out the wavy lines around the edges of moving objects.
What I'm looking for is something like this:
When we open FCP, are there any preferences we need to have set before we import our source or will FCP adjust our project settings to match our source?
When done editing, do we need to do anything special when we send it to compressor?
Once in DVDSP, what do we need to be doing to make sure it comes out looking it's best.
I realize I am asking a lot here, but we're not novices. We understand things like the format of our media, etc. We're looking for a list or bullet point process to get from Media to DVD and have it look it's best.
Thank you
Cliff

Answer 1

If you have any doubts regarding the format you shot,
look in the Browser, control-click the media file, and select Item Properties > Format.
That will tell you exactly what FCP thinks you're using.
Note that if Field Dominance is None, your clip is progressive.
In the future, you should ask your camera crew to shoot progressive.
crp0499 wrote:
Creator: QT Player
Source: HD 2:XDCAM
Vid Rate: 29.97 fps
Frame Size: 1440 x 1080
Compressor: XDCAM HD 1080i60 (35 mb/s VBR)
You may want to simplify the workflow by setting your sequence up first.
Before you create any sequences, choose menu item > Easy Setup,
and choose one of the XDCAM presets.
• Chose Sony XDCAM HD
• Choose HDCAM HD 1080i60 VBR
• Choose framerate 20.97
Once you do this, all new sequences will have that format.
If you've set your sequence up correctly, dragging a clip to the sequence will not produce this:
For best performance, your sequence and external video should be set to the format
of the clips you are editing. Change sequence settings to match clip settings?
If you click yes, you are not transcoding. You are setting the sequence format to be the same
as what you shot.
The bottom line is that when you set the sequence to match the footage,
you should be able to play the footage without rendering. Of course,
once you start editing and adding transitions, rendering may become
necessary. Check out the note on rendering to ProRes 422 in this article:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/ex1_sd_outputyoung.html
Although he's talking about going from XDCAM EX to a PAL DVD,
most of the principles apply. In particular:
• Set Rendering preferences to ProRes 422, i.e.
Sequence Settings > Render Control > Render > Codec
• Do your HD edit.
• When it's time to convert to SD (step 2 in the article) create a new sequence
with the settings NTSC Anamorphic. This will preserve the nice wide-screen look
of the original footage even when played on an SD DVD.
• Step 4 of the article: choose NTSC anamorphic.
If your footage was shot interlaced, choose field dominance lower (even).
The compressor is NTSC, and the frame rate is 29.97.
In the advanced compression settings, note that it should be 16:9,
and Progressive if you're shooting or converting to progressive.
Check out the last section of this article:
http://www.lafcpug.org/features/featurekeeping_thejob.html
where field dominance is discussed in more detail.
Right when you got the WiFi, file-sharing, and printing working great–
they hand you a video camera!
I've got the reverse problem.