How to preserve video quality throughout editing

Hey guys,

The past two/three years I have been doing the recital video for a local dance studio. Currently my process is using a T3i with 70-200 f/2.8 and a GL2 along with a H4n for audio. This past year I used the free trial of Final Cut so I didn't have to manually sync each and every video clip/audio file manually. Once I worked out the kinks it worked pretty well.

However, the final quality of the DVD wasn't anything close to the original DSLR files or a typical store bought DVD. I can't figure out the problem.

The only thing I can think of is that I edited in Final Cut, then went to iDVD to make a dual layer file, then put it in Roxio to compress it a touch more to make it fit (the final DVD was 3 hours long).

I tried to do as little compression as possible up until the final stages so I don't know what I could have done differently... Any tips?

Thanks!

Have you tried putting it two DVD's rather than squeeze it onto one.

Initially I put it all on one DVD (what I did in previous years although this years recital was longer) and the quality was pretty bad. I tried two SL DVDs and the quality was better but not any different (IMO) compared to a single DL DVD. The DL was cheaper than 2 SL DVDs (and more convenient for the customer) so I went that route.

Thanks for the reply!