DVD quality-TV vs. Computer screen

[Hector Melendez]

I haven’t had too much experience with Encore but I think changing to “Automatic” encoding in the >project tap>transcoding setting>automatic. This will burn the DVD up to best quality settings….
If I’m wrong please correct me

[Mindy Hilt]

Thanks, I’ll do that. Also, (I’m dumb) I just figured out that obviously a DVD is 720×480 at 72dpi and that’s going to look low res on a computer screen no matter what I do. It looks O.K. in a window, but when you view full screen, it looks pretty bad. I can’t believe how long it took me to figure this out.

[Rob Neidig]

The main problem with how it looks on a computer screen is probably that your footage is interlaced rather than progressive scan. What that means is that video has two fields of information for every frame. The fields are displayed roughly every 60th of a second. The first field has half the lines of resolution, showing every other line of the picture, then the second field displays, showing the other half the resolution. These two fields are “Interlaced” to make one complete frame. TVs are designed to show video this way. Computer screens use Progressive Scan. That is, they display all the lines of a frame in order – no interlacing, no every other line field issue. But when you try to play interlaced video on a computer monitor, it results in that flicker and loss of resolution you are seeing. So to make things look better on a computer screen, you would want to encode your video as progressive, or use a “de-interlace” function. Unfortunately that sometimes results in a jerky look to the video when played on TV sets (unless they are a progressive scan display). Ain’t DVD fun?

Rob