1080 HD Material to DVD-R

[Sofi Marshall]

Here is my workflow. Please tell me if you think I’m doing some wrong, missing a step, etc…

I’m editing 1080 24p from Sony HDCAM in Avid Media Composer. I’m exporting my film as a “same as source” QT reference file.

Then I bring this file into compressor and use the “DVD: Best 90 minutes” compression setting, changing only the bit rate to be 7.5.

Then I bring that into DVDSP, it imports with a green check mark and I make my DVD.

The DVD quality is acceptable, but it does tend to randomly skip when played in most DVD players, and sometimes skips up to 30 seconds of a scene before playing normally again. Maybe this has to do with burning the DVD straight from DVDSP? I know in iDVD I would always make a disk image and then use disk utility to burn and would get much more reliable DVD’s. Should I be using disk utility or even Toast to burn?

So there’s nothing wrong with this method, but it seems like I should be able to use a higher quality compression since my film is so small (10 Minutes). Since I will distributing this DVD to festivals, I want to make sure that I’m getting the very best quality possible. If using compressor to go to m2v is the best setting, then that’s just what I’ll have to do. However, after doing some research is seems like a lot of people are unhappy with the way that Compressor deals with the downscale from HD to SD. In that case, I’m willing to try other programs that may handle the downscale better, but the BitVice is pretty expensive.

Thanks!
Sofi

[Michael Sacci]

Compressor does a great job if you set it correctly, you never want an average bitrate that high. in fact on short video CBR at 6.5 and above will always give you better looking and more compatible encodes than any VBR, VBRs help when you need a lower average bitrate. And Bit Vise is better when you get to 4 and below.

[Sofi Marshall] “but it does tend to randomly skip when played in most DVD players,”
this is a bitrate problem and it will happen with any encoder at that bitrate..

[Sofi Marshall]

To close out this thread…

I encoded the DVD as CBR at a bit rate of 6.5 and have a good looking product with no skips on the DVD that I burned out of DVD SP.

Thanks to everyone for the input, and hopefully next time this process will be a lot easier!

[Michael Sacci]

Glad you got it all worked out.