• DVD Authoring

  How do you get High Quality DVD Video

  Posted by Richard Pengelly on January 31, 2008 at 4:15 am

  I have worked allot on DV based projects and whenever I go to create a DVD of the material it’s quality suffers horribly. I have played with the bit rates and all of the settings but no matter what I cannot get the video I see in the original to look the same on the DVD. I understand it probably has something to do with the resolution of the format. The projects I have done on 35mm look better but still lose something. I am working on FCP and DVDSP.
  I am just sick of seeing my hard work end up looking like crap on these DVD’s.

  I know this issue has many possible answers from hardware to software to compression knowledge and so on. Any ideas or comments would be greatly appreciated.

  Thanks
  Richard P

  Richard Pengelly replied 18 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Eric Pautsch

  January 31, 2008 at 3:14 pm

  Your encode is only as good as your source. DV isn’t the best source material to run through an encoder. Also the encoder itself is a big factor. Are you using Compressor?

  Always remember, your encodes will never looks as good as the original source – especially to you, who put alot of work day after day into the piece. Encoding is the most important part in any project so it helps to learn as much as you can about about MPEG2, how encoding for DVD works and what encoding parameters work best for your project. Learn you encoder’s setting and what they do. What bitrate did you use?
• 

  Michael Sacci

  February 5, 2008 at 2:24 pm

  There will always be a quality loss, limiting the amount is the main concern. Remember DV is 13 GB per hour and you put as much as 2 hours on a DVD at 4.7 GB,

  Things that really kill m2v encodes are a lot of noise and bright reds especially when coming from DV footage.

  The first thing to try with the resources you have is to export to compressor from the FCP timeline and try a CBR encode with bitrates above 6 Mbps, make sure you encode the audio as ac3 to give you more space for the video.

  Then if still not happy try BitVice then if still not happy there are the 2K plus software encoders or hardware encoders.
• 

  Richard Pengelly

  February 6, 2008 at 4:19 am

  Thank you very much for the replies they have helped me make sense out of the results I have been getting
  The video I was using in this project was grainy under exposed and generaly crap video. I understand the garbage in garbage out idea but it really looked bad on the DVD. Strobing pixels desaturated colours and the brightness went way up. I was using compressor.

  Field order Auto
  Two Pass VBR
  Bit rate 6.4
  Max Bitrate7.5 constant

  Motion Estimation Best

  Would using the constant bitrate would stop the strobing pixels?

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