DVD Studio Pro

I have a copy of DVD Studio Pro, and have never bothered to use it! Weird, I know, but it's always seemed very intimidating, and iDVD is so fun and easy to use (and for most quick projects does 90% of what you want anyway) that I just haven't felt the need.

But I'm starting to feel that I should at least consider exploring using it. Adventures in HD editing and compressing are leading me to wonder if using Compressor separately to create the MPEG2 file for the DVD might be able to produce better results than by using iDVD's off-the-shelf default settings.

I had a lot of problems with iDVD 5 compressing HD video to an NTSC Anamorphic DVD (lots of jitter when the camera was panning). I upgraded to iDVD 6, and the quality has improved 100% with almost no jitter, but there's still some flickering of horizontal lines going on that I don't like and am wondering if I can eliminate or minimize even more.

My first experiment was to try exporting from Final Cur Pro HD format to DV NTSC Anamorphic first, and then putting that into iDVD. In other words, creating an inter-step file and seeing if iDVD compressed that better (or the combined conversion to anamorphic and then compression was better that using the HD content straight into iDVD.) That test was a failure. The HD->iDVD material looked better than the HD->Anamorphic DV->iDVD content (slightly less flickering in places.)


Oh, so anyway, figuring that DVD Studio Pro is pretty complicated, I was looking for a good book. I see that there's Apple Pro Training Series : DVD Studio Pro 4 and Apple Pro Training Series : DVD Studio Pro 3 available at Amazon. That's different editions of the same book. Interestingly the reviews for the 'new edition' say that it hasn't really been updated to cover the new version and (this is where it get's interesting) the DVDSP 3 edition is $3.15 cheaper. So should I just buy the old version even though I have DVDSP 4?

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