Burning to DVD

I'm editing wedding footage in Final Cut on my MBP for a friend of mine. I've never tried making a movie dvd that will play in a dvd player though. I figure I need to render as a certain file type then use iDVD to make it?

Any help is appreciated.

If you're going to use iDVD, simply do File > Export > QuickTime. NOT QuickTime Conversion. Make it Self Contained, and take that into iDVD. That's your only choice.

Going to DVD Studio Pro you'd go to Compressor and make your own MPEG-2 and AAC files, which gives you much greater control over visual and audio quality. And it's not that hard to learn. The Apple Pro Training Series is the best library around for learning the pro apps. They're what we use in Apple Authorized Trainings, comes with tutorial material, so you're learning by doing, not by just reading.

But with iDVD, yep, just make a self contained QT movie directly from the Timeline window. And be sure everything is fully rendered out first.

Thanks alot!

I've found it unnecessary to export to self-contained Quick Time. It takes too long and iDVD does just as well with the un-self-contained as long as, of course, the Final Cut video remains available. What that means is that the un-self-contained QT is not a complete QT but a bunch of programs that tell iDVD how to interpret FC videos; it is a reference file. As long as the file to which it references remains where it was when the QT was made, iDVD doesn't know the difference.