poor quality dvd aftre filming in 1080p

[Graham Bernard]

You don’t get 1080 with DVDs. The other issues will need us to establish just WHAT you’ve done.

Grazie

Video Content Creator and Potter
PC 7 64-bit 16gb * Intel® Core™i7-2600k Quad Core 3.40GHz * 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 Ti
Cameras: Canon XF300 + PowerShot SX50HS Bridge

[John Rofrano]

[Tom Wambaugh] “Starting with great 1080p footage but after Vegas and Architect are done the movie is washed out, pixelated and faces have no features- just white blobs.”

Have you done any color correcting? Are you using a calibrated monitor? DVD’s will be limited a Studio RGB levels. If you’re not correcting your HD footage to fall within this limit it might look washed out when compared with the original. How small are the faces? DVD’s have 5x less resolution so if the faces are small, I could see them easily getting pixleated when reduce 5 times!

~jr

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

[Tom Wambaugh]

the faces are pretty small so it makes sense that they would degrade when you mention 5x fewer pixels! How does Hollywood do it on DVD?
I am doing lots of color correcting. Lots of effects. will this affect the final product negatively? No to calibrated monitor but that is the least of my worries-I’m not even close to the fine tuning that monitor calibration would make. I’ve got dancers whose faces look like 8 or 10 pixels smooshed together.

[Tom Wambaugh]

Even if it’s not 1080, I’d love to get anything even close to the kind of DVD quality I see in movies.
Shot with 3 Panasonic HD camcorders, 1 Canon SX50HS, 1 Canon 7d.
Vegas Project- 1920×1080, progressive scan, Square pixel aspect ratio, 29.970 NTSC Frame rate, 32-bit floating point pixel format, Best rendering, Guassian blur, Blend fields
Rendered in lots of different formats, all 1920×1080 max quality, from 8-25 Mbps
DVDA dual layer disc, 9.8 Mbps, 16:9, 720×480, 29.97 Frame rate or BR Mpeg 2, 18 Mbps, 16:9, 1920×1080 24 frames progressive

[John Rofrano]

[Tom Wambaugh] “32-bit floating point pixel format”

Why are you using 32-bit pixel format? Are any of your sources 10-bit? 32-bit floating point (video levels) is recommended when working with 10-bit YUV input/output or when using xvYCC/x.v.Color media. This could be contributing to your problem.

~jr

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

[John Rofrano]

[Tom Wambaugh] “the faces are pretty small so it makes sense that they would degrade when you mention 5x fewer pixels!”

Yea, DVD’s are pretty low res when you think about it.

[Tom Wambaugh] “How does Hollywood do it on DVD?”

They hire a team of people to encode each scene at the optimal bit-rate and settings for that scene. They do not simply “render it out” in a single pass.

[Tom Wambaugh] “I am doing lots of color correcting. Lots of effects. will this affect the final product negatively? “

Everything you do affects the final outcome. I would start by dropping raw footage into a default 8-bit project and render to DVD and see how it looks without any processing. Then you can determine if your processing is causing this.

[Tom Wambaugh] “No to calibrated monitor but that is the least of my worries-I’m not even close to the fine tuning that monitor calibration would make.”

Does the video look washed out on your uncalibrated monitor, or on an HD TV? I agree it should look the same on your uncalibrated monitor as it did while editing. If it looks different on TV it could be a monitor calibration issue.

~jr

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

[Stephen Mann]

How does Hollywood do it on DVD?

With lots of money.
As john said, with teams of people, and huge renderfarms.
And more money.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com