There is NO PATH from Final Cut Pro to DVD/BlueRay with 5.1 surround!!!!

You made some good points and I mostly agree with them from a technical standpoint. But....

"DVD is still very popular..." Yes, it is, because it's understood. People have been popping discs in players of one kind or another for literal decades.

Inserting a USB stick...not so much. In fact, hardly ever. Yes, its technically easier, unless you don't know about it or haven't ever done it. Yes, a lot of media players have a USB slot, but many do not, like Apple TV for example. TVs do, but where is it? Around the back? And the TV is hanging on the wall over the mantle? Ok...so stick it in the AVR. And now you introduce a whole different UI that the user is unfamiliar with.

The other small issue is that a DVD-R blank is under $1, often under $.50. A quality USB stick (note: "Quality", because it has to last a while) is many times that, and size isn't the issue, speed and quality is. Then there's the duplication/replication issue. I have a 6-tray DVD duplicator that runs at about 10X or higher, with images stored on an internal HDD. It also verifies each disc. While copying a file to a memory stick might be faster, there's no real verification. Yes, it should be better and more reliable, but you do have to pay for quality memory for that, and you loose again. And it's one stick at a time, or invest in a USB stick duplicator. Except the unit cost is too high.

Then there's storage. The users with media servers or connected PCs are really in the minority. So where do they store all these USB sticks? How do we label them? There's no box that fits on a shelf with all the other media. It should be convenient, but the reality is, it's not.

Between the less efficient duplication, higher cost, and high confusion factor, I've never been able to push a USB stick output to any of my clients, no matter how much I'd like to. If USB memory were the wave of the future, we'd be seeing media sold on them, and that's not happening at all.

Until small-producer, or event producers have access to affordable streaming an pay-wall based rental, we're kind of stuck with the dead discs, regardless of what Apple thinks. I'm well aware of what Jobs didn't like about discs, but they're still in the world, and frankly, I'm not sure about the licensing thing. I have a BD-R burner, and the hardware, software, and blank media isn't very expensive at all.

At best, we're in the transition phase for small productions. Streaming is geared to the mega studios, not small productions. And the process just to get content on Amazon Prime is a steep incline. YouTube is easy, but no paywall. Vimeo has a paywall, but its complex and hard to manage. And so on. Believe me, I'd love to stream this stuff, it's just impractical.

My use case may be small in the grand scheme. But Final Cut is also small in the grand scheme, being beaten roundly in the mid-market by Premier and now Resolve is maturing. Avid owns the Hollywood editing market, and FCP lost that opportunity when they introduced X. So FCP is squarely in my world, and so are DVDs. I don't like it, but it's what it is.

And Apple has "decided" for us. Again. Reality, or not.

Nice idea, but no. My last version was 10.6.6 (limited by older hardware and older OS) and while I did restore that from a TM backup (suprising), once the project has been created or opened by 10.8, it can't be opened by a previous version. I don't know about 10.7, but I don't have a copy, so I'm pretty much done.

I'm still at "Apple makes presumptuous choices that mess up the user experience." Pretty solid on that.

I just reordered DVD-R blanks. $0.33 each in 100 quantity. That’s a “disposable” price, and a confirmed high quality product that I’ve used regularly with well under 1% reject. I get the inkjet printable full face ones and print a label directly on them.

Looking at USB sticks, I eliminate all the “off brand” ones because their reliability is horrible, and looking at known brands like SanDisk, the low price was $3.35 each, 8gb (because 4gb is just a bit small and not really cheaper), literally over 10X a DVD-R. And there’s still a reliability and labeling issue, even with SanDisk.

I haven’t looked at the Windows solution because of already investing heavily in Apple for video related computers. I have a bunch of Windows machines, just not really high performance. Probably will have to look into it though.

Thanks, but as I replied to Louis above, I do not have 10.7 at all.

Part of the goal in hardware upgrades was to speed workflow. And it does, right up until output, then it stalls completely. Going back to an older Mac with, in my case, FCP 10.6.6, is in my view a poor decision, though clearly it would "work". But, though I'm not on the 2-3 year hardware upgrade cycle Apple would like (mine was more like 10 years), I do keep older working machines around. My last one won't update the OS, so it's frozen in time in many ways. Just not a good way to commit to business, and not the point of the pricey hardware upgrade I just did.

Good for you on the recording of TV. I've had two DVD recorders in the last 25 years, neither lasted very long, one a failed DVD drive, the other the HDD. I keep it to QC DVD burns. And the concept never made the jump to HD, rendering them kind of semi-useless.

If you've been recording TV since 1981, we're actually in the same boat. You probably have stacks of tapes (mine are mostly Beta), and digitizing that is a crippling proposition. Again, I have old working hardware. And stacks of 8mm, Hi-8, miniDV, a few UMatics and Betacams. I dumped my 1" C tapes though. Just...well, couldn't deal with them.

It's funny now the latest hardware upgrade forces you to use the old hardware and software to do the job. I admit to testing the Toast workflow, which is what I'll be doing for the immediat gig. Then, we'll have to see.

I was able to try terryb's suggestion and export to XML from 10.8.1, then run the file through editingtools and experiment to find a version that would open in 10.6.6. Kinda. Not without complaining of errors, and I'm not sure what they are, but the project seems to work. I think. I doubt I'll use this solution though.

I also found a "trial" version of 10.7 but there's no way to apply my license to it to get it out of trial mode. It'll run 90 days though.