It's all here. How the pros do it. Obsessing over individual _scenes_ from a 2hr feature to make sure there are no artifacts. Coding and reencoding. I also just ran across an interview (someone emailed me) from the chief at DVCC (DVCC is the premier compression bureau in the world) talking about how important quant matrices are, about how they experiment with them for each picture and evaluate the results. If you're not iterating and evaluating your compression results, you're really not producing something of quality. Unless your content is extraordinarily easy to compress. If you're shooting on 29.97i, the chances of that are slim to none unless it is a camera on a tripod pointed at a talking head:

http://www.filmsondisc.com/Features/compressionist.htm

Remember when you were a kid and watched the wrong monster movie. Nightmares wracked you out of bed in the middle of the night, a cold sweat making your flannel pajamas clammy. It's a long time since Jim Babinski, Compressionist for WAMO, had his sleep interrupted by images of Godzilla using Jim as the missile in a game of monsterball, but working in the pressure seat as a guy responsible for getting the best MPEG2 images on a DVD can provide it own nightmare's.

Yet, there are 'experts' in the Mac arena who believe that black box encoders are what the pros use. It's a farce.

If you're an indie and you're putting your creativity on the line to fund, shoot, edit and want to compress your own DVD, you might as well add another learning curve and obsessive quality pursuit to your list. So now we've got: cinematography, motion graphics, editing, audio production and video compression and disc authoring.