Hey!

Working on a bunch a videos that will become a professionally duplicated DVD.

What's the best way to deliver they videos? All settings I found in Compressor for DVDs yield rather abyssmal results.
And is there any ways to export higher res files that retain chapter markings? I'm not sure if authoring will be done on Mac or PC... (guess I should find out)

Well DVD video itself is pretty abysmal. Kind of always has been. I'd author in Adobe Encore as that's the only way to geta good DVD with chapters, a n acceptable menu (which you will have to create in Photoshop, etc). It is not a simple or even straightforward task to create a good end product on disc. FCP only offers bare-bones DVDs which assumes you only have one video on your DVD.

I craft DVDs / BRDs weekly for film transfers I run but never use Compressor. I render ProRes files directly from FCP, Make certain the field is set to PROGRESSIVE & not interlaced.

Once the file is finished, open it in Quicktime Player 7. Do Command + J. Got to Video Track. Check box... √ Hight Quality. √ Single Field, √ Deinterlace

The quality of the disc is determined by the streaming bitrate of the encode. For the mastering of the DVD / BRD... DVDs typically stream at (4.5 Mbps DVD or 16 MBPS BRD) allowing 2 hrs per disc. I double the streaming bitrate to the max a player will stream before it chokes (9.0 Mbps DVD / 26 MBPS BRD) which means only 1:06 can be placed on a DVD. (25 Gb BRD will take 2 hr encodes fine.) Dual Layer discs are used for 2 hr content.

Encoding discs in this manner means I can pick up the grain of the movie film I transferred whereas the 'normal' DVD encode turns grain into undefined mush.

Thanks for the replies!

Yes, DVD is abysmal. But feels like the files I manage to create are even more abysmal than normal

Good to know that 9.0 Mbps is what is used as that is the max that compressor will do.

I will only provide files, the authoring I will have no part of.

How about subtitles/captions? Can FCPX output subtitles that work with DVDs? If so, how?

Are you making the DVDs to be viewed on an actual TV using a DVD player? If so will it be viewed on an HD or SD TV? If it is an SD TV the DVD will look OK. If it is a HD TV you might want to burn a Blu-ray disc but only scale up about 30-40%. There will be a black border around the video but it will have a little better detail than burning it to DVD and having it scale up over 200%.