Best setting for export for DVD into compressor and finish off in DVD studio Pro

[E’mya Greene]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for response.

What settings do you suggest when outputting using mpeg streamclip ?

Thanks

[E’mya Greene]

Hey Gary,

Thank you for your response, please see below to answer your questions.

[Gary]
What codec are you using for your export (ProRes, Animation, H264, other)? How does that file look when played back?

– Current settings which is – Apple ProRes 422 HQ
– Make self contained movie

[Gary]
What do you mean by “super pixelated”? Really blocky?… or just not as sharp as the original? I’m assuming that the original footage is HD so you have to keep in mind that DVDs are SD. There’s a fair amount of scaling that has to be done to get HD to SD and this may be part of what you’re seeing.

Yes, not as sharp just blocky and fuzzy the more you expand to full screen. Yes scaling plays a massive part in that conversion understood, but i didn’t think it would be as blatant as it looks. Clearly the quality is low res.

[Gary]
What are you using to add titles… or do you mean menus? The graphics tools and templates provided in DVDSP are not great. If possible, build your menus using Photoshop or something similar but make sure the screen resolution and aspect ratio are the proper size so DVDSP doesn’t have to do any scaling.

Yes sorry menus. I’ve created a simple menu layout for a play all option and Chapters. I’ve made sure i’ve ticked the 16:9 option also.

[Gary]
How are you viewing the finished version? If you are just looking at the program screen in DVDSP then that could be the problem. You need to burn a disk and play that on a TV. Or, write the DVD to a folder on your computer and play that using your computer’s DVD player.

I’ve viewed it on my computer as well as on dvd to watch and it looks the same. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Only got today left to sort this.

Thanks

[Gary Milligan]

[E'mya Greene] “Yes, not as sharp just blocky and fuzzy the more you expand to full screen.”

Image sharpness will always suffer when you expand playback on a computer to full screen, especially if it’s a SD file.

On another note, the image quality difference between ProRes 422 and ProRes 422HQ is negligible. The biggest difference is the file size. 422HQ is used more as a working format when doing a lot of image processing (colour correction, etc.).

Good luck with your deadline.

Gary