Burning 1920×1080 into a format to be read by DVD player

[John Rofrano]

[Ernie Re] ” I was disapointed to see that my options for saving to a DVD basically downgraded my quality from 1920 x 1080 to 720 x 480. Am I missing something or is this all that can be done? Is this a limitation of the software or is it the player?”

It’s a limitation of the DVD player which was introduced in 1995 to replace the VCR and has no idea what to do with high definition media which wasn’t introduced until much later. You need to get yourself a Blu-ray player or HD media server if you want to playack HD on your TV (assuming your TV is also HD).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Ernie Re]

That being the case, why are movies in DVD format of superior quality? Are you saying that a typical movie on DVD is limited to the lower resoluton as well? The picture quality from a commercial DVD movie is like 10x better.

[Joe White]

If you shot your movies on 35 mm film, using lighting rigs that cost as mush as some countries GNP and had access to a Studio level DVD encoder (ie costing hundreds of thousand dollars) your movies would look that much better too.

But we in the regular world film on cameras with sensors the size of grains of rice, in terrible natural lighting, without a tripod and expect the world.

[John Rofrano]

[Joe White] “If you shot your movies on 35 mm film, using lighting rigs that cost as mush as some countries GNP and had access to a Studio level DVD encoder (ie costing hundreds of thousand dollars) your movies would look that much better too.”

Also, there is a person (or people) in the studio who’s job it is to do the encoding scene-by-scene and even frame-by-frame. That’s right! they don’t push a button and encode the whole movie to MPEG2 like we do. They take it scene by scene and tweak the encoder to make the most of every shot. Most of us don’t have the time, patients, or money to do that.

If it’s any consolation, a DVD made from downconverted HD will look better than a DVD made from DV. So you do get an increase in quality by starting with HD even if you end up with DVD. Hollywood starts with 4K source for even more quality improvement.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Ernie Re]

So are you saying that the DVD player is limited to 720 x 480 and hence the hollywood DVDs are encoded to 720 x 480 as well but the just look better – even though the TVs are 1080p?

[Joe White]

DVD spec maxs out at 720×480 (or 720×576 if you are in PAL land)

Most above average TV’s now have VERY good upscalers to make the most of SD signals.

Another thing is most all commercial DVD’s are dual layer and have ~8 gigs to work with rather then the run of the mill single layer DVD most consumers use which is limited to ~4 gigs and change.

[John Rofrano]

[Joe White] “Most above average TV’s now have VERY good upscalers to make the most of SD signals.”

This is really key. My DVD players all have upscalers. Of course, so do Blu-ray players when playing back DVD’s. If you have an older DVD player without a good upscaler, even Hollywood DVD’s aren’t going to look that good on a 50″+ HD TV.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Rob Franks]

If you want 19020*1080 then you will have to buy a Blu Ray player and start burning Blu Ray.

If you want dvd at the same quality as a commercial dvd then I suggest you buy a movie studio…. because that’s the only way it will happen.

[Dave Haynie]

Technically, for home use, you can burn an AVCHD DVD and play it on just about any Blu-ray player. In fact, if you shoot on an AVCHD camcorder at 18Mb/s or less, you can pretty much drag your AVCHD file structure into a program like Nero Burning ROM, create a DVD with UDF 2.5 format, and you get a playable disc… as long as you don’t care about having all that much playing time on it (at 18Mb/s, a DVD5 will give you about 35 minutes of HD video).

Of course, if you’re editing (as you should), you can’t just drag the files over, and DVD Architect won’t create a proper AVCHD disc. No worries, though. Author in MPEG-2 at 16Mb/s (the limit on Sony AVC), then use a utility like multiAVCHD to create the disc.

And yeah, only on Blu-ray players. DVD is and was always a standard definition format. There have been a very few red-laser DVD players with extended capabilities, just like some can play MP3 or limited AVI files (like DivX), but most are limited to 720×480 NTSC or 720×576 PAL.

-Dave