Apple Final Cut Pro 5 - Manual (Page 1573)

222 Part III Output
In most cases, the compression markers that are placed automatically by Final Cut Pro
will suffice. However, in areas of abrupt visual change that take place inside a clip with
no edit point to give it away, a user-placed compression marker can help to compress
that section more smoothly. For example, suppose you have a shot that contains an
extremely fast 180-degree pan from a jungle scene to the beach behind the camera.
This rapid change has no cut point for Final Cut Pro to detect automatically. But if you
manually place compression markers at frames in this clip occurring immediately
before and after the pan, compression applications such as Compressor will know to
place I-frames at those points in the compressed video to minimize any compression
artifacts.
A compression marker is distinguished by the text <COMPRESSION> appearing in the
Comment field of its Edit Marker window. For details on adding and deleting markers,
see Volume II, Chapter 4, “Using Markers.”
Compression markers will export differently depending on whether you’re exporting a
sequence or a clip.
 If you’re exporting a clip: You must place compression markers in the clip for a
compression track to be created.
 If you’re exporting an edited sequence: Final Cut Pro exports compression markers for
each cut, transition, and gap that appears in your sequence, in addition to any
compression markers that you added manually to the sequence. Compression
markers added to individual clips are ignored.
About the DVD Authoring Applications
Whether you intend to use iDVD or DVD Studio Pro will affect how you export your
movies from Final Cut Pro. When you are using DVD Studio Pro, Compressor can
become an important part of the process.
Using iDVD
iDVD only imports standard QuickTime movies as video sources. This means that if you
intend to use iDVD as your DVD authoring application, you only need to export a
QuickTime movie from Final Cut Pro. iDVD automatically encodes the video and audio
sources to be DVD-compliant. The video is encoded as MPEG-2 at a quality controlled
by a preference setting and the video length. The audio is encoded as uncompressed
AIFF.
For more information, see “ Exporting a QuickTime Movie for DVD Use ” on page 224.
See the iDVD documentation for information on importing the movie and adding it to
your DVD.