Newbie needs guidance with video formats, quality, and just a general kick start

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Newbie needs guidance with video formats, quality, and just a general kick start

Posted by Mark Angel on July 27, 2011 at 1:57 am

Hey folks, first post here, please be gentle 🙂

I think this could get long. Please bear with me….

So I’m an audio guy. I do, and have done, lots of digital and analogue multi-track recording, editing etc, and now I find myself working with some video.

The task:

I have come concert footage of several concerts recorded on a single Panasonic NV-DS25 DV camera. I have multi-track audio of the same concerts and I have to add the audio to the video, edit the lot together, add credits, song titles, a watermark, and produce a DVD with scene selection menu etc.

My problem: The video quality is coming out pretty poor and I’m not really sure if it’s something I’m doing wrong, something I’m not doing that might help, or just one of those things. Specifically, the picture quality (subject matter) is poor when looking on my (34″???) LCD TV. Some of the fonts I’ve added to the video for titles etc are fuzzy and others are just plain unreadable.

My process:

So I’m grabbing the video from the camera using capture from Sony Vegas (I think it invokes the Windows capture) using firewire. I use default settings for everything (the video comes in as an AVI. I then load up the video into Vegas with the mix down of the multi-track audio (currently using mp3 or wav… audio quality isn’t my problem here) and sync the two.

I then edit away, add song titles to the beginning of each song, add a watermark in the top left corner, (Learnt about safe areas the hard way!!!), and add credits at the end. This is then rendered as an AVI using default settings except I select “best” for quality.

The resultant avi then gets pulled into DVD architect where I add a menu, pull in a separate short clip of intro titles before the menu and then “create DVD”. Again using default settings.

So, does this process sound about right? Should I be mindful of anything? Am I using the right formats? (I’m familiar with the concept of compression from the work with audio recordings).

It takes so long from tweak to DVD – is there anything something I can do to speed up this process. I should add that generally the video looks OK on my 19″ PC screen.

Thanks in advance for any guidance, help, comments.

Mark

PS: Why doesn’t the forum let me use the work “help” in my post subject?

Mark Angel replied 15 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
2 Replies

Dave Lozinski
August 3, 2011 at 6:28 am

Hmmm… you didn’t mention anything about file size, resolutions, or formats.

First off I would try rendering as a separate WMV or mp4 file just to compare results. I wouldn’t even concern yourself with trying to get it to DVD at this point. Just try rendering out to different formats and different settings as a separate file to see what works best for you.

There are lots of settings when rendering which can cause all sorts of spotty issues like this. For instance, if you’re original video is 640×480 and you’re trying to render something a lot larger like 1920×1080 — good luck with quality. 🙂

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https://www.davelozinski.com
https://www.davelozinski.com/DemoReel/
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Mark Angel
August 6, 2011 at 6:08 am

Thanks Dave, I’m getting there slowly. Just trying out the different settings at each stage.

Cheers

Mark

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