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Encoding in Premiere for DVD Output
Hi All,
I’ve been going through a series of tests to determine the best encoding settings to use for projects renderered out of AE, and edited in Premiere. Bear with me if you don’t mind. I prefer to encode out of premiere rather than encore because often there is a timeline with a bunch of clips. To do it in Encore I’d have to first render the timeline, then import, then encode in encore. Here’s what I’ve found so far :I’m using MGEG2-DVD Format at the highest quality. The original material was field rendered (or was video captures which have fields) out of AE. When I set the Field order in the encoder settings to Progressive, the eventual DVD output looks great (motion and edge quality) but not on all of our DVD players. We have 3 different types. It looks great on a sharp DV-MX1, and a Panasonic (don’t have the number), but on our sony’s (we have 3 DVP-NS575P’s) the motion looks strobed. It looks like the fields are either reversed, or just not playing back well. If I use the lower field setting (either with or without the deinterlace button checked), the motion on all players looks good, but I get an ugly distortion around the edges – exactly the same way after effects footage looks when it’s deinterlaced prior to rendering with fields. I’m not sure what good the field setting is in the media encoder if you can’t get clean results using that. I guess I’m wondering if other people are using progressive encodings, or using field settings. If you’re using fields, what have you done to get a clean output. Secondly, does anyone have any experience with either the Sony DVD player mentioned, or similar machines that had playback problems with field rendered stuff?
Two additional notes : All of this was played back on high quality NTSC monitors, not the computer screen, and interestingly enough, the sony with the problems played back the video fine in areas where there was no field rendered material.Any thoughts would be great. This is driving me nuts.
Sincerely,
Michael Goldberg -
2 Replies
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Michael,
When you say distortion around the edges, do you mean within the safe area on people etc, or in the overscan area ?A distortion could be a field order reversed. Have you tried encoding a single file, say DV, when you know the field order is lower first, and see the results then ? In my experience, PP2 does not always recognize the right field order on import.
I avoid progressive unless I know it will be played on computers only, or projection. Very few set top DVD players deal with progressive very well, and the artifacts you are seeing are probably the DVD player trying to convert the footage back to interlaced so that it can be viewed on a standard monitor. Bottom line encode for the popular choice, which right now is interlaced.
Also by highest quality, you might mean 9 Mbps which isn’t recommended for burned media because of the potential error inducing rate.
Vince
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Hi Vincent,
The distortion I’m seeing is mainly around text edges, or graphic lines. It looks like field mush. It looks like the only 1 field is being used. I know that the footage I’m using is lower field, and that is the field choice I used. I also tried using upper field, thinking I’ve seen the encoder have issues with reversing the field order in past versions. This issue is definitely new to PP2.0. In PP 1, the fields were in fact reversed, and I encoded upper field, but that did look great. Now in PP 2.0 Progressive seems to look the best, and there seems to be no difference in the output if I switch from lf to uf (this part really makes no sense).Mike
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