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Compress HD Footage to SD DVD problems

Hello first time poster here. I don't know if this is something covered in the premium forums or not, but I did a search for my question, but nothing came up that seemed to be a discussion of specifically this topic.

I have what should be a simple project to burn to a DVD, because it is only 10 minutes long, shot in HD on a consumer Canon MiniDV camera, time remapped to 600% in Final Cut and edited along side stop motion animation photography, as well as animated graphics produced in after effects. However, every time I put the project through a compressor to to put it into MPEG2 for burning to a SD DVD, there is a lot of pixelation and blur. It is worth mentioning that the work contains a lot of pale pink graphic patterns on bright red that repeat at different scales throughout the work, which will probably make it more difficult to get a good result, right?

I've tried exporting from Final Cut, I've tried Compressor, and I've tried iDVD. iDVD is the best, surprisingly. I always export from Final Cut using a fast uncompressed export with current settings. My timeline is 1440x1080 HDV in 23.98fps. My final product will be NTSC MPEG DVD. The DVDs we are using are standard 12cm DVD5 from Staples. The work needs to be good enough to be projected with a high quality projector at a large scale.

I'd like for this not to be just a discussion about this particular project, but to include information on how professional DVDs usually get made, because I found this process to be so difficult. I am looking for the best quality possible, the best brand of DVD, the best compression software money can buy, on PC OR Mac, etc, as well as things that are in the prosumer category for indie filmmakers to finish their work and send it out on the festival circuit.
 
I use Adobe Encore for authoring DVD's.. I let IT do the transcoding and so far I'm very happy. I render out of AE or PRO at the BEST HD quality I can. Drag that into Encore. Encore will transcode it to DVD format.

You should note that if your watching SD material, its not going to LOOK like HD.. cause its not.. so maybe everything is fine, but your expecting it to look BETTER then SD.. just sayin..
 
I haven't tried Encore yet, have you tried Compressor or iDVD and found Encore to be better? I'm not expecting it to look like the HD footage, I just am expecting it to look like a DVD you could purchase or watch of a professionally made movie. It looks bad even on a 24in display.

I am also wondering about better ways to get this projected. Maybe DVD is an old technology and I could be focusing on learning about them. Albeit I still need to get this burned on a DVD, and I need it to look perfect, not just okay, which is why I began this topic.
 
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