What steps should I follow to create a video? I'm lost regarding video formats.

AIC if you can afford it...

would be the best way to go. Big files usually mean better quality. And since they're coming from already compressed files you want to maintain some quality since you're going to edit them again.

Anamorphic would work for a widescreen format. check a few files or small sequence all the way your pipeline (workflow) before transcoding everything.

H.264 is a delivery codec, but it's not intended for burning to a DVD. What you're final product will be determines what your should output it as. Mpeg2 for DVD authoring for instance.

Same goes for the still images... it depends on where their going next.

That is a big "depends." For a project that long I'd say just start it when you're going to bed or leaving for a few hours, and should be done by the time you return.

Roco said:

Just what I did. Not sure how long it taked, but it was done at the morning.

Now, I saw a quite bad loss of quality. Is this to be expected? I've made DVD before and they looked better after burning.

I used iDVD at "Best Quality". This as seen in my MacBook. The left one is from the DVD, the right one is the movie exported from FCE.

Click to expand...

Quality loss is to be expected because DVDs are very compressed. Also, the example you are using, high contrast, red, gfx/font w/fine edges is almost a 'perfect storm' worst case scenario for DVD compression.


Lethal

Roco said:

OK, so I played the DVD in my widescreen TV, and it is all cropped. The right and left side are cropped. It looks just OK when playing it in my laptop.

The steps I followed is export from FCE as a quicktime movie. Then opened in quicktime and changed it's size to 1280x720. And in iDVD I selected widescreen and burned the DVD. Anything I am missing?

The timeline in FCE is APple Intermediate Coded 1080 i60.

Thanks a lot.

Click to expand...

I'm guessing you're bleeding into the TV Safe area for your video... that's probably part of why it's "cropped".

There's an option to show this in wireframe in your viewer in Final Cut.

If your final output medium is DVD, you also have to remember that you're burning your HD video as SD. You don't need to worry about "changing the size" in quicktime. Just make sure the aspect ratio is set for 16:9.

Make sure on your DVD player and/or TV that you don't have any sort of 'zoom' feature enabled.


Lethal

Roco said:

Thanks huntercr.

One doubt, why does it looks OK in me laptop, but not in TV?

So, all my videos should stay inside the outer guide, and titles should stay inside the inner guide?

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Your laptop will play the whole video and not have anything cut off. The outer guide ( and inner guide for that matter ) is a hold over from Analog TV. You never know how much of the border of a TV tube/LCD screen/etc is going to be covered by the physical frame of the TV, so you just assume that there will be some cut off. You shouldn't shrink your video all the way to the TV safe border ( outer ), you should just remember that some of the video past that border won't likely be seen by your viewer. This is just something to remember when framing your shot. You don't want "important" things outside of the outer border.

As for the title safe area, I have no idea if this is truly where it came from, but it's what I was told ( I'm not a TV/Film professional, just a hobbiest ):
Title safe is there because it used to be that TV tubes were so rounded that outside of the "title safe" area, they would get noticeably distorted. That's not true anymore with LCDs/OLEDs/etc, but it stays around because it's logical to have things you want to be "required reading" be in the center.

Anyway you said it didn't fix things.. can you create a comparison set of pictures for us to see just how clipped you're talking about?
From your last post, it sounds like it's getting severely clipped.

I would assume it's what LethalWolfe said... your TV is auto zooming for some reason.

Hope this helps!