Cinema Screening/FCP Export Settings

OK, so I've managed to land a cinema premiere for my movie. On Friday, I'm going to the cinema to test out a scene.

Basically, I'm wondering what are the BEST export settings to burn to DVD? I'm going to screen the movie via DVD. I've shot in 25fps on a Sony HDR FX1E camcorder. Nice quality.

Do I simply Export > QuickTime Movie or do I take the Export > QuickTime conversion route?

Any help would be much, much appreciated.

 

What format did you edit? And it probably depends more on how good of a DVD authoring/transcoding can be done on your end, and what software/hardware you'll be doing it with. Compressor does an okay job, but not as good as a dedicated hardware unit. Any way you look at it, a DVD will only be standard def, and then projected large will exacerbate its limitations. So for starters, you could try a setting in Compressor that gives you a higher bitrate, but you should test to see if the player can handle it without choking. But basically, you'd either send right to Compressor from FCP, or do it with an exported quicktime from your timeline.

Are you familiar enough with making DVD's from your FCP project or do you need a step-by-step?

Depending on the shooting and editing format, and the graphics, I've sometimes had to first downsize to a 480 before having it transcoded to .m2v in Compressor for best results on the DVD.