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Noise in white areas on DVD
I’ve tried everything I can think of to solve this and I’m wondering if it’s the nature of DVDs or if I’ve missed something.
I have a DVD with a lot of text. The workflow was a 720p TIFF sequence from After Effects, assembled in Quicktime as a self-contained file, and then resized and encoded with Compressor to m2v for DVD. DVD is assembled with DVD Studio Pro.
When I play back on a DVD player, the white text that has a black stroke on it looks noisy – not like interlaced weirdness, more like dancing noise. It doesn’t happen on the big white bar I have on a lower third. It seems very random and mainly with the text.
On other DVDs in this player, it happens on some things but not others. One DVD I played hardly had any noise at all.
On two other lower qualityish DVD players, it happens. On normal to high quality players, it doesn’t happen at all. What the heck?
Things that had no effect:
-The whites and blacks were all in legal range, but I brought them down further.
-Made sure all the text with thick and sans serif.
-Tried making the stroke width thicker and taking it away entirely.
-Encoded m2v at a lower bitrate.
-Made the text bigger and smaller.
-Took the assembled TIFF sequence to ProRes before m2v (also tried resizing it AND transcoding to ProRes, then transcoding to m2v)I think I tried a couple other things too, but I can’t think of them at the moment. Any thoughts about the noise in the white areas, and why it would happen more in the lower quality players? Is it just that the player sucks? If so, why wouldn’t it consistently play all DVDs with white text poorly (other authored DVDs from outside productions, not Hollywood DVDs).
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9 Replies
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Does the noise look like a pattern of dots around the text? If so, that is mosquito noise, an artifiact produced during MPEG-2 encoding. Better encoders & higher bitrates produce less of this artifact or eliminate it completely. Better DVD players and many of the more expensive home theater surround receivers have filters to supress mosquito noise.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Thank you! That’s definitely it. I’ve never heard of that before. Is this something we’ll have to deal with in all mid-level encoders? I use Compressor for all my encoding needs right now, but I’d certainly be willing to switch it up to Sorenson or Telestream if their encoding is better.
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What were your settings when you resized the video in Compressor?
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Hi Kylee,
I understand that you said you kept the colors legal, and may also have brought them down a little, but they may need a bit more adjustment.
“Pure white” can be too much for the monitor to handle, such as going black to white, the contrast is very strong. I never go over 235,235,235 for my whites. They will look a little gray on the computer monitor, but on the video monitor they still look white but cause less problems.
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
I’ve done it several times by now with the same results, but I know I used Compressor’s default m2v settings once, and then another time I changed the average bitrate to around 5 and max 7.2, and another time brought it up a little. I let it resize with the default settings. I also set up a job chain on one try and resized it to another ProRes file, THEN transcode for DVD. All produced exactly the same results.
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Right, my whites were originally just under 235. I brought them way down on one test and still had the same issues. Thanks though.
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I would turn on “Frame Controls” and choose the “Resize Filter” of “Better” or “Best.” Also, be sure to choose “Deinterlace” to “Better.”
The defaults usually don’t give great results.
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You might want to try out Sorenson’s and Telestream’s demo software to see whether they handle mosquito noise any better than Compressor does. We don’t use either of these for DVD encoding, so I don’t know whether either of these applications would be helpful.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I tried Sorenson, AME, and Bitvice.
I guess you could say I’m not a huge fan of DVD authoring 🙂 Thanks for your input!
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