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Hello everyone and thank you for tuning Inside Geek Canada. My name is Evan Thies and today's our Application and Tech Feature and today I am going to be taking a look at two programs inside Final Cut Studio 2 and that's going to be Compressor 3 and DVD Studio Pro. And basically what I am going to go through today is how to take an exported file from something like Final Cut or even Avid and how to use Compressor to make into a DVD format and then how to use DVD Studio Pro to burn it to a DVD.
Now this can be done in a couple of different ways but I am just going to show you basically how to make a really high quality on DVD. What I first recommend doing when you export out of your editing program whether that be Final Cut or Avid or whatever, make sure it's quite high quality. Like, you either use the original Compression setting you worked in whether that be DVCPRO HD or HDV. Make sure it's exported in that or no compression or something really high.
The reason for this, is that way you are starting off with the best possible quality and then we are burning a really high quality DVD from that, because that way everything is going to be in the pretty high quality standard the whole way through. So let's go through to the tutorial.
Now here we are in the desktop. Now I am going to be using a file called Beer Pour.mov and this is simply some stock photography I did. A beer being poured into a glass, but you can use any files that's been exported straight from a nonlinear editing system. I recommend using as uncompressed as possible simply because you have the best looking compression in the end.
So I will just take this file and I will drag it into Compressor. When we are in Compressor, we get a menu similar to this. Now it will vary slightly depending on your set up and your resolution and all that. But generally it will look something like this. Up here you have basically the actual clip in here. And what we are going to want to do is Compress for DVD.
So as you can see here, if I just collapse these menus, you can see there is just the standard Apple ones and then your Custom grouping. So let's just go to DVD and let's pick DVD Best Quality 90 Minutes. Now this will depend completely on the length of your project, because if you have a 2-3 hour project, it's going to be quite a bit different. But this clip is only few seconds and the reason I am doing it like that is simply so I can speed up in this video. But if you are doing something longer, you might want to change the Compression settings from what I am doing.
But if you are doing something, say, under 15 minutes or a like even a 30 seconds spot on a commercial, then you can definitely follow my instructions here and get a really high quality encode. So I am just going to select this one and this one. I am going to drag them both on to here.
Now this basically sets the destination and the source is fine, that mean we will just go to where I have the original file. What I want to talk about is the individual settings of each of the encoding. So this here is the MPEG-2 with the video. So let's first take a look at that and you can see down here in the Inspector. You can see all the stuff here and what I am going to do is go to the second button here. And we are going to look at the Quality. Now for Quality sliders, let's bump these as far up as possible and so we set the Maximum Bit Rate at 9.0 megabits per second and the Average Bit Rate at around 7 or 8 and that tends to be the maximum we want to go with this.
And it is a standard definition DVD. If you are doing a Blu-ray, you can do that here. The Video Format, it should be chosen automatically. Don't choose how the Frame Rate is, whether it's going to be in NTSC, the Aspect Ratio and whether it's going to be Progressive or Interlaced and that should basically set the DVD for you.
And if you want you can go into the Audio as well and you can set the Data Rate even higher. Right now its set to 192 which isn't bad, but you could go all the way up to the max if you really you wanted to. It's not going to make a huge difference depending on the audio and how it was captured. Sample Rate, you do want it 48 because that's video standard and the rest of this is pretty much standard.
But the main thing is to bump up that video quality and that will make a really superb conversion. When you actually exporting the DVD, you will get some really high quality DVD and that's the nice thing about doing a shorter clip. You can really maximize the quality. But if you are doing like two hours, you kind of spread out the quality. It will still be good, but it's not going to be as great because you can't focus on the high quality encode here. The file size is going to be really large for just small clip on a DVD, but overall it's going to look pretty good.
So from there you can just go ahead and click Submit and it will say that and just go ahead and hit Submit. So the encode is finished now. Now if you notice here over here I have the file. Now this particular video didn't actually have audio but if you had audio you would have two files here. One being the M2V, one being the AC3. And the M2V is the video, the high quality video that we just did and the AC3 is the audio format and these are both the formats you need for the DVD.
So further just drag this file here into QuickTime and you can see the encode is quite high quality and this one is from high definition. So you can see it did of course, down converted to standard definition NTSC, but if I close out of this here and start a DVD Studio Pro. Now this is the main interface for DVD Studio Pro, but what I want to do is just show you how the clip we make, a DVD that when you stick into the DVD player is going to play right off the bat. No menu, none of that stuff for now but so up here we are going to click Delete on the Menu and we are just going to add this Track 1. So right-click on that and then go First Play.
Now that basically tells it that this track is going to play right away when you put it in the DVD Player. So down here in the Assets, let's go to Import and I want to bring in my m2v file. Now you will notice down here by Status it has a green light. Basically, that says it's good to go. It doesn't need to be transcoded. You can throw it in that DVD and it will be burned.
The reason I use Compressor to encode it is because you can simply control everything from being a really good quality and just still be a decent quality, but have a really small file size. You can control that a lot in Compressor than here, otherwise if you just brought the raw and will be your AVI file, it actually you have to actually converted and transcoded in the burn process.
And if you have the audio here, you have an AC3 file as well. Since I don't, we can just double-click here on the Track 1. This will bring it up in the Viewer and simply drag it over the Video 1 track. Now if you had audio as well you could drag them together and they go in the a1 and a2 stereo tracks here.
If you scrub this, once again you can see it playing and basically that's all you need to get the video kind of in there and the DVD ready to go. Now if you were to click Burn, you could actually burn this into a DVD, but if you go simulate, this basically simulates how the DVD is going to look. You can see great quality playing on how the DVD would.
So obviously this is a very simple striped down version of what's possible with DVD Studio Pro and Compressor. But it does show you that you really have all the control you want and especially when burning a DVD, it's really important. If you are working with a client or he would like a 30 second spot, you can really get the high quality encodes on your DVD and then just use DVD Studio Pro as I did here to make a quick playable DVD.
So let's just look at two programs at the Final Cut Studio, the one being Compressor and the other being DVD Studio Pro. We looked at basically how to compress a high quality DVD and then burn it using DVD Studio Pro.
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