How not to make DVDs of your favorite TV shows

What I've been doing for close to a year now is capturing shows with AlchemyTV DVR to .MOVs on my hard drive, then editing out commercials in Final Cut Express 1.0.1, exporting .MOV and dropping into iDVD.

For a while it seemed to work great. However, we began to notice that the audio sync was slightly off in a few places. Doing some tech searching it was strongly suggested that drift could be caused by capturing video to your startup HD.

So, we bought a second internal ATA Maxtor and changed all of AlchemyTV's and Final Cut's settings to do nothing with the startup disk and do everything in the second disk. For a while that worked, too, but soon we began to see the same problem in our DVDs.

So, I optimized the second HD before all DVD projects. No go. Out of curiosity I looked at the FC export .MOV (which QT 6 could not play, but QT 7 can) -- the drift was there. In the export. The original .MOVs were fine. So, I experimented with different recording codecs. No dice. Some movies came into FC fine, others came in with noticeable sync problems, even before export.

After bothering FC experts in a forum, they gave several suggestions:

• FC isn't meant to work with anything other than pristine DV straight out of a DV-cam.
• QT movies not from DV-cams don't guarantee 48.000KHz recording rates and FC, unlike QT Player, isn't capable of dealing with less than perfection. The irony here is that Linux developers have known for years that consumer Canon DV-cams don't output perfect 48.000 and Apple's had to write code to compensate for it for years.

We came to the mutual conclusion that if QT Pro could do the edits and export reference movies to iDVD's satisfaction, that this was the best solution. QT Pro costs $29.99; FCE HD's upgrade was $99 with no guarantee it would deliver the results I needed.

If I needed professional video effects this would be a real problem. But for the home user who's just making DVDs of their favorite shows or dubbing from old VHS, QT Pro is all the tool you need, and you'll avoid an unnecessary extra transcoding before burning.