Why can't I get my 122min movie on a DVD-DL

Question

Hi everyone. I am new to FCPX, but I was a quite confortable user to iMovie.
As I have to get a 122min movie on a DVD, I am obviously using dual layers.
First, I tried to do it with FCPX itself, using the Share > DVD... menu.
Setting it to Double layers, I was happy to use this function compressing my movie to 7 Go - everything works fine and the time left was in good relation with the job done. Until..
When it gets to 47% the estimated time left grows up to 38 hours or so, and it just either takes 12 hours to get to 52% or the "time left" itself gets even longer !
So I decided to get Compressor and try to work with the right thing... but it just seems to do exactly the same thing.
Is there any way I could be told what's wrong in my process? I've learned and read on so many forums Compressor was the right way to do this.
What are the setup I gotta use?
My movie is a 1080p - HD - 1920x1080 - 23,98p
I am working on a iMac, quadcore, 10.6.8
Thank you for your time

Answer 1

Actually, the only difference between Compressor and FCPX DVD disk authoring capabilities is that Compressor offers you the ability to set chapter markers.
The typical advice one reads on these and other Compresssion-related forums is to take a short section of the source file and test it to determine quality and to verify workflow. Unfortunately, with DL DVD, things are trickier and that approach isn't really possible…we don't know whether we have a successful project until we actually burn it and it plays on DVD players.
A couple of things:
What codec is your movie sequence in? If it's H.264, consider transcoding to Pro Res. FCPX and Compressor both will probably be happier if not given a delivery codec l to down-scale from 1080 to 480, encode to DVD standards and also try to determine a break poiny in one fell swoop.
Also, consider down-scaling the movie to SD 16:9 as one stand-alone job. Then take the SD QuickTime output file and use the DVD share preset as a second stand-alone job. If you do that, use Frame Controls for the down-rez job and set the Resize filter to Better or Best.
Another point: be aware that regardless of whether you use the Compressor or FCPX Share>DVD function, you'll get only a single disk. It's not like DVDSP or iDVD where you can sequentially churn out multiple copies. (You can, of course, make copies of your disk when you have burned one successfully.)
Finally, since you have iMovie>DVD experience, I'm assuming you have iDVD installed. Were it my project, and if I didn't have DVD Studio Pro as an authoring option, I would definitely consider going the iDVD route.
Good luck.
Russ