Poor Quality Output

[Daniel Ludwig]

Hi Leng,
you haven´t give us informations about some very important things:

1.) workflow
2.) what material you´ve edited (which codec)
3.) which MPEG2-setting you´ve used

adobe media encoder engine is based on Mainconcept technologie, which could create very good results in MPEG2 depending on the input-material.

so there are many informations missing!

cheers

danny

[Leng Ong]

Ok, I have an hd video (.avi) that was made in ae, in which i did some minor editing and added sound in premiere. I am exporting from premiere however have tried various settings and don’t know which would be the right one. after exporting the files still look great, but once i import to encore then let it transcode the quality is poor. I notice when I use the premiere export setting mpegdvd it also gives a poor output.
Even when i just take a straight hd video i’ve recorded from my camera and import it to encore I get a crappy output. I am not trying to build a blueray, just a dvd. i’ve tried resizing my original to sd first but that didn’t work either. I’ve tried deinterlacing…no go.

help 🙁

thanks

[Daniel Ludwig]

again,
you haven´t told us which setting you´ve used for your AE-output. is it a HDV-setting or DVCPRO HD, or what ever.

what transcoding-preset you´ve used with encore? MPEG2HD or H264 for blu-ray? or did you try to create an SD-DVD?

if you go SD, it´s no longer compareable with HD, especially if you´re in NTSC-land.

cheers

danny

[Leng Ong]

AE preset: HDTV 29.97 square pixels exported as an avi no compression codec
Encore Preset: NTSC DV High Quality 7MB VBR 2Pass

I realize I can skip the step in premiere and just add the sound separate in encore but that still doesn’t solve my problem.

I know that sd & hd are not comparable in quality, but I have hd movie files that i just want to present in a standard dvd of decent quality. This is posing to be a bigger problem than necessary. The output is so poor it is unusable.

Thanks

[Daniel Ludwig]

gotcha,
here is the big mistake.

HDTV no compressed in upper field first, DV NTSC is lower field first, so you´ll have a problem with your field dominance.

you need to create a different encoding-setting (non-preset) for encoding with upper field first.

cheers

danny

[Paul Benson]

You might also find this article by Jon Geddes of interest:
https://www.precomposed.com/blog/2009/07/hd-to-sd-dvd-best-methods/

I use a very similar process with just SD footage since these tools do a much higher quality video for the amount of bytes.

Pauley

[James Greene]

Thank you for posting the link Paul,

I have also recently been required to produce SD DVDs from HD content (until now I’ve had a strictly HD, file based workflow) and I am finding that the results of a pure CS5 workflow are unacceptable. Very disappointing for such an expensive software bundle that touts it’s integration/workflow.

Here are the particulars of my workflow in case anyone has suggestions/tweaks to get the best final output. (note: I’m sitting at home so these are from memory and may be a bit off or incomplete.)

Footage: 30 to 45 minute comp @ 1280×720 59.94p 8-bit 4:2:2 YUV
Captured via BlackMagic Multibridge Pro over HD-SDI (produces a .avi that is roughly 100 – 150 GB)
Premiere Pro CS5 sequence based on above footage (drag & dupicate)
Graphics & Titles are laid in and the sequence is sent to Encore via dynamic link
Build is set to autoplay and replay (so no menus or additional assets on disk, just the footage)
Encore setting: Mpeg-2 VBR 2 pass, target 7, max 8, min 4. (not many settings available via dynamic link)

Transcoding takes roughly 20 minutes and the end result is very bad. (Yes, I know that a 30 minute, anamorphic 480p dvd file that is roughly 2GB isn’t going to hold a candle to the original 100GB avi but the output looks decidedly “YouTube” with lots of artifacts and severe text aliasing.

Editing Hardware:
6-core i7 980x @ 3.33GHz (no over-clocking)
12 GB ram (6x2GB)
nVidia gtx480 (not using the Mercury Playback hack – had some stability issues)
3TB disk array for capture & render (Samsung Spinpoints on an Intel controller)
150GB Velociraptor scratch disk
Adobe Production Premium CS5

Camera: Panasonic HPX-300 @ 720p59.97

Thanks to everyone on CC for sharing your expertise!
Jim Greene

[Mohamed Qais]

hi i have a problim in windows 7 when i put clip on timline source monitor & output monitor show me very poor result i open project in
matrox pal 16:9 widescreen preset but when i open project in adobe dv pal widescreen preset quality is amazing can any 1 know about this issue,regard
Qais