Recently shot a 24min. short in HD.Fairly large file and I need to compress and burn to DVD.I realze I won't get HD on DVD,but I need decent compression for Festival submission.Any sample settings I might try?

Question

Recently edited a short to 24min.in FCPX.It is 1920x1080 24fps.It is large and I want to send on dvd for film festival submissions.How should I compress in Compressor to have the best quality and get it all on a dvd.I realize I won't get HD,but I need it small enough for dvd retaining some quality.

Answer 1

The short answer is,  take a short but representative section and  "test" and "re-test" until you get the best results you can attain.
Some further suggestions:
I assume that the festival specified DVD and that Blu-Ray is not an option.
The size of the file really doesn't matter to Compressor except that it somewhat reflects your movie's resolution and down-scaling from HD sizes to SD can introduce artifacts.
Start with the standard Disk Burning preset; duplicate it and save as custom settings; name them appropriately as you make adjustments so you can see at a glance what settings worked better or worse.
In Audio, set Dialogue Normalization to -31.
Don't judge the image quality on your computer. The Apple DVD Player may give you a rough idea of whether you have issues. But it's necessary to play out to a broadcast monitor or TV from a DVD player to see what it will truly look like.
Although it's possible that basic Disk Burning preset will give you what you want, I suggest turning opening Frame Controls (which should already be turned on) and setting the re-size filter to Best. You should also consider doing the scaling and the MPEG 2 encodes as separate steps (separate jobs).
The Encoder section of the Inspector allows you to adjust quality settings. You can test CBR and VBR settings at different bit rates. If VBR, use the Two Pass; the default bit rates are pretty good…you might be able to bump them up a little, but I wouldn't go above 8 Mbs.
BTW, how were you planning to burn them? If it's from Compressor, choose Hard Drive as Output Device to make a disk image. You can burn multiple copies from that disk image. You can also drag the Video TS folder into DVD Player to get a preliminary look at your results.
Good luck.
Russ