[Obi Wan]

Hi all! I've been doing lots of video work in Final Cut Express 3.5 and attempted to burn DVDs of my work in iDVD. Every time I burn a new disc it's always the same - stills (like in a slide show) look great, but if there's any quick motion in the video, there are pixelated lines trailing the movement. I've tried exporting using various types of Quicktime Conversion, and eventually read that you shouldn't use Conversion if you're going to DVD, just export to a Quicktime Movie. This lead me to a weird 16:9 v/s 4:3 issue that I eventually resolved by purchasing QT Pro, but I still can't seem to get the lines to go away. The QT file looks fine on my computer, but then when I burn it to disc and watch it on a DVD player hooked up to a TV those blurry lines come back whenever something moves quickly. I've tried different settings on iDVD - "Best Quality" v/s "Best Performance" and nothing seems to fix this.

Here's me after burning 7 or 8 discs using different methods only to have the same result every time ->

Before I upgraded to FCE 3.5 I used DVD Studio Pro 1.5 and it worked great. Now, however, the ability to export from FCE to an mpeg2 has been removed, rendering my old DVDSP 1.5 effectively worthless. Unless I can figure out a better system for burning DVDs, I'm going to declare iDVD officially worthless as well! Does anyone have any ideas about this? Is there any trick to getting good looking videos in iDVD, or am I going to have spring for the Final Cut Studio to get a new version of DVDSP and Compressor?

And why in the name of all that's holy did they decide to get rid of FCE's ability to export mpeg2? Exporting to a QT file, then having iDVD create the mpeg2 while burning seems like it creates an extra step. What's the point of that? If you could export as an mpeg2 and drop that into iDVD is would be so much nicer but I guess that's another complaint for another time.

Thanks in advance for any help that you might have!

[Obi Wan]

I finally got a decent DVD that plays OK but the quality isn't quite what it was with my old setup. The image quality looks a little softer to me, and the edges of objects aren't as sharp as I feel like they were back when I was using FCE 1 and DVDSP 1.5.

Because of all this, I'm seriously considering biting the bullet and picking up the FCP suite. I'm wondering though, has anybody else noticed this? Has anybody noticed any difference in quality of DVDs created in DVDSP and iDVD? Or what about iDVD 8 v/s iDVD 6? Are there improvements between the versions (specifically in the mpeg2 encoder) that could make my final DVDs look better? Is it worthwhile for me to consider the move to DVDSP? Any advice or recommendations?

Thanks in advance!