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Authoring novice seeking advice..
Hello!
I’d like to be able to do some decent authoring on my home PC for presenting animation/motion graphics work. E.g. club visuals, festival screenings.I managed to author a DVD once but the result was unacceptable quality. It occurred to me that what I need to do is to get more RAM and upgrade my graphics card.
Authoring software: Currently have DVD it Pro 6 and Ulead DVD movie factory 3.0. My authoring experiment used one or both of these but I reckon it’s a graphics card problem. I’m open to trying other free/affordable programs if these are a no-no.
Thanks in advance for your advice..
Current Graphics Card:
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Approximate Total Memory 128.0MBSystem Spec:
Microsoft Windows XP
Service Pack 2
Dell DIMENSION DIM4600 Intel(R)
Pentium (R) 4 CPU 3.00 GHZ
2.99GHZ, 512 MB of RAM -
4 Replies
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Hello Mildred,
What are you using to encode your video? If you are dropping Quicktime movies into your authoring software, you probably need an encoding solution that can produce better image quality. We have Sorenson Squeeze on one machine, and it produces consistently good looking video.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
Hello Bill,
Thanks for the suggestion.A typical process would be animation made in flash exported as pngs or quicktime movie to After Effects. In AE, encoded as either AVI or QT and authored in DVDit PRO 6. If you think there is anything wrong with this procedure, i’d be grateful for your advice.
Sorry for my ignorance..I’m not sure if Sorenson is purely for encoding (e.g. making a really “well” compressed avi which i have to then open up in DVD authoring software..
Or if i can make playable DVD’s from it?The Sorenson Squeeze Compression Suite 4.5 (kinda pricy but would be similar to installing a new graphics card i suppose)
says it does disc-burning.. wonder if it means authoring..Do you think that one can achieve DVD authoring results of acceptable quality using a standard graphics card that came free with one’s PC?
Thanks for your kind help.
M -
The graphics card does not affect the quality of DVD encoding. It might speed up the process if the software you use is written to take advantage of an advanced graphics card. But MPEG-2 encoding crunches on the main CPU.
Our experience with DVDit Pro 6 is that if you just drop a Quicktime movie into it, you will get a mediocre picture encode. Not terrible but not really good looking either. It’s really designed only to encode short pieces like still or motion menus. That is why you need a decent MPEG-2 encoding solution. The encoding process determines the image quality of your entire DVD. Every DVD authoring software is designed to accept MPEG-2 streams. THAT is what plays off the finished DVD. If you feed your system any other kind of file, it is making MPEG-2 under the hood without telling you. The best way to improve the image quality of your discs is to make high quality encodes yourself.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
thanks very much for your reply.. it made sense that you said that quicktimes to dvdit pro 6 do not yield great results. i’ll try to make an mpeg 2 instead and author from that..
thanks again.
:>
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