Adobe Encore Low Quality

Adobe Encore DVD

Adobe Encore Low Quality

Posted by Steve Richard on February 27, 2012 at 7:52 pm

Hi everyone, I really need your help with my videos that I am creating for a friend. It is a bit complex as I used many software’s and need your help to produce the best quality DVD possible. I hope you understand my explanation.

My friend hired out a wedding company to film his wedding. They didn’t do a great job at it and he was really upset. Important parts was missed out.

I have been editing videos for quite some time and have gained some basic skills so I decided to fix his wedding film.

Firstly, I extracted the parts from the DVD using CloneDVD2 which gave me few .vob files. I then used Sony Vegas Pro 11.0 (64bit) to edit the parts and add extra parts. The parts extracted from the wedding film where shot at 25 fps. After everything was complete I rendered the project as:

The quality looked great and everything was going smoothly.

The second thing I did was create a motion menu in Adobe After Effects CS5.5 and was rendered at HD settings. This was also going smoothly.

The final step was creating the DVD using Adobe Encore CS5.1
I think this is where I had lost “quality” of the videos files that where going to be used in the wedding film.

In order for files to work correctly they will need to be converted into the correct format. So when it comes to transcoding the dvd player can easily recognize the video files.

For the video files to work I had to convert the wedding parts using Adobe Media Encoder CS5.5 I used the following settings on the wedding parts. Format-: H.264 Preset-: HDTV 1080p 25 High Quality
The files where converted from .wmv to .mp4

After all the files where converted using Adobe Media Encoder CS5.5 I imported them into Adobe Encore where I created the DVD using the following setting. Format-: DVD Output-: DVD Image Size-: 8.54 dual layer.

Final outcome was horrible. The quality of the wedding parts where not “high standard”. Some of the times you can see blur on people. The motion menu that was created was looked very low quality.

Can someone please help me fix the problem?
Can I create 720p PAL DVDs?
Is there a shorter process of encoding the parts using so many different Adobe Programs?
Can I use dynamic link to help with the encoding?

I hope you have understood my explanation.
Please feel free to ask if you do not understand something.

Many thanks,

Steve Richard

Jeff Pulera replied 14 years, 6 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Jeff Pulera
February 28, 2012 at 2:50 pm

Hi Steve,

Sorry to say that the workflow is very convoluted and fundamentally flawed.

DVD is standard definition, always. Since you apparently pulled the bulk of the video from an existing DVD, and you wish for the end result to again be DVD, the whole workflow should remain at DVD resolution, 720×480 for NTSC and 720×576 for PAL.

From your screen grab, it looks like you are using a 1080p project template, then exporting that to Windows Media at 720p, then converting that to 1080 .mp4, so that you can finally encode back down to DVD. The video will definitely look awful doing all these size and format conversions.

I understand that perhaps you are mixing in some additional footage to the existing DVD footage, HDV perhaps? Since you are working with mostly SD footage, and the delivery will be SD, you should stay with PAL project presets throughout. Taking the SD clips up to HD, then back to SD, will really soften them up, so just edit any new HD material in the SD project alongside the SD material from the DVD.

Note that DVD video is very highly compressed, so that footage is weak to start with, then you are re-encoding it again (a few times it seems). You must keep the re-encodes to a minimum.

I would use a PAL preset in Vegas, combine all your footage and do the editing, then from the timeline, export to MPEG-2 for DVD. You should end up with two files, an .m2v for video and .wav for audio (multiplexing OFF to get this result).

In Encore, choose “File > Import as Timeline” and multi-select the .m2v and .wav files to bring them in together.

With this workflow, you are taking the DVD footage, and only re-encoding it ONE TIME, with no scaling changes either. Any new footage you may have added to the mix is also getting transcoded just one time. This will yield the best possible results.

I hope this is helpful

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers
Steve Richard
March 2, 2012 at 7:30 pm

Hi Jeff Pulera,

Thanks for your response and it sure was really helpful.
My workflow is hard to understand sorry about that, it’s because I’m using soo many different type of softwares for the wedding film.
Motion Menus need to be created using one software and another software is used to create the project files.

After reading you comments my workflow should be much better. As now I know what I have to do in order to produce high quality videos.

SD is 480p quality isn’t it? In order to fit 720p and 1080p videos on disc I will need to use Blu-ray discs?

Thanks,

Steve Richard
Jeff Pulera
March 5, 2012 at 4:22 pm

Hi Steve,

DVDs are by definition SD only, being NTSC or PAL. That is 720×480 for NTSC and 720×576 for PAL. Period. There is a workaround by which short HD files can be put on a DVD disc and played in certain Blu-ray players, but this is NOT a “DVD video”, it is just HD files on DVD media and will not play in a DVD player.

So you are correct that any 720p or 1080i/p content would need to be on a Blu-ray disc then.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

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