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Rendering HD video to SD for DVD
I shot some HDV widescreen video footage that will be used in a DVD that I’m making. I captured it into Vegas. Although the footage was shot in HD, the DVD will be produced in SD. The raw video quality is excellent. The pixel aspect ratio is 1.3333 HD Widescreen. I rendered it using the NTSC DV Widescreen template and imported it into DVD Architect. When I produced the DVD the video quality was not very good. Is there another template in Vegas that I should have used that would give me a better quality? I realize that I can’t expect the quality to be as good as the original footage but what I ended up with is unacceptable to me.
Thanks for any comments you can offer.
Johnny
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6 Replies
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What is unacceptable about it? Does it look as good as the DVD’s you’ve created from SD footage? You can’t expect 6Mbps SD at 720×480 to look as good as 25Mbps HDV at 1920×1080. It’s 5x less information and it’s a big difference. I think the DVD’s that I make from my HDV footage look better than my SD footage and all I do is render with the NTSC DVD Architect Widescreen video stream template.
Also, what are you viewing it on to determine the quality? An SD DVD on a 50″ HDTV is going to look worse than on a 40″ which will look worse than a 32″. In other words, the more you have to scale the SD the worse it will look. Are you using a DVD player that upscales SD to HD? That also make a difference in the quality you will see.
Bottom line it should look better than other SD DVD’s you have made but don’t expect it to approach HD quality.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
John,
Thank you for your response. I’m comparing (on the same TV) HD video rendered to NTSC DV widescreen versus SD video rendered to NTSC DV and the SD is slightly better even though the original HD footage is much better.
Since my original post I went back and rendered the HD video in Vegas using the HDV 1080-60i avi template, imported it to DVD Architect and rendered in Architect to NTSC Widescreen and got better results. Is it my imagination or should this give better quality? Obviously the file size will be larger going this route.
I’m obviously a newbie in this area.
Thank you,
Johnny -
When I started using Vegas with HD I had similar problems. I was getting various jagged edges and poor quality going to SD. I tried numerous bit rates and templates but never found one satisfactory. I now use Procoder (old Canopus). I render to m2t from the Vegas timeline, then use Procoder to go to mpeg2. It is fast, efficient and gives much better results for subsequent authoring.
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Thanks Jim.
Johnny
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It should have definitely looked better than your SD footage and letting DVD Architect convert the footage to MPEG2 may have actually used different parameters than doing it from Vegas so it is possible that the DVD Architect could look different.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
…. when rendering in Vegas from HD to SD-DVD it is very important to always check for BEST quality setting on your render template to DVD arch…. working with good old DV doesn’t makes too much difference between good and best quality (besides rendering times)… my 2 cents…
good luck
Enrique Orozco R.
iDEA DigitalVideoStudio
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