Jeff Bellune
Forum Replies Created
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Is your source footage interlaced? Perhaps Upper Field First? If so, change the field dominance during AME export to UFF as well.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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The .wmv files have to be transcoded to mpeg2 anyway before Encore can burn them to DVD, so you might as well do it in Vegas and save the huge quality hit.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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[Stephen Poleweski] “Should I just render all my video files to mpeg2?”
Yes.
Encoding to .wmv compresses the source video heavily, and then re-compressing it to mpeg2 further degrades the original quality.
To decode, play and transcode .wmv files, especially on a Mac, may involve some heavy lifting for your system that could easily contribute to this problem.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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Why render to .wmv? DVD is mpeg2. WMV is an even stranger choice considering you’re on a Mac.
Please give some more details about your project.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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[nathan quattrini] “If we edit the footage as separate movies in separate projects, how do we then put the 2 movies on 1 DVD without any problems? Will it work fine?”
Keep ’em in separate timelines in Encore and you’ll be OK.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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[james g. brown] “Does Hollywood use some software/hardware that I am unaware of and is totally out of reach?”
Yes and Most Emphatically Yes. They also use an army of video engineers who do nothing except transcode to DVD-compliant mpeg video all day long. They are experts, they are using (in most cases) software that is custom designed for them, and they encode frame-by-frame if they have to.
As in all things, some are better at it than others, which is why some DVDs are reference quality and others are merely ordinary.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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[james g. brown] “i don’t really work with live footage, just rendered frames from 3ds max which are rendered out with fields.”
This makes a transition to progressive output very easy. Just export frame-based progressive image sequences (or video) out of Max and edit them in a progressive Pr project and/or AE comp. Export to mpeg with No Fields (Progressive Scan). When Encore builds the final DVD, it will recognize the progressive video in the mpeg file, and set the appropriate flags for progressive playback, even though the video will be stored on disc as interlaced.
[james g. brown] “i always export my final project from after effects or premiere as an MPEG-2 with a constant bitrate of 7mbps, quality of 5”
Using a DVD burner with the latest firmware updates, and quality blank media (Taiyo Yuden or Verbatim), I’ve had very good success recently with one-pass VBR with a min bit rate of 3.5, a target bit rate of 6 and a max bit rate of 8. I’ve become a big fan of VBR over CBR, even if only one pass is used. However, 2 or more passes are recommended to squeeze that last bit of quality out of the transcoding process.
As for the quality slider, you only really need to use 5 when your video has lots of motion or lots of tiny details (like leaves on trees in a forest scene). Otherwise, a slider setting of 2 or 3 will produce good results in far less time than a setting of 5. And you always have the option of transcoding different parts of the video with different settings, depending on the content in those parts. Again, that is how Hollywood does it.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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[james g. brown] “I have had clients complaining about how they can see the fields and a reduced quality in aliasing when they play back my DVDs on PC screens and LCD TVs. I understand why and so I am thinking about changing everything I do to Progressive footage.”
All video is stored on DVD-Video discs as interlaced, even progressive footage. When a DVD is displayed on a progressive display device like a computer monitor or an HDTV, it is up to either the DVD player or the display device to deinterlace the footage.
The quality that your clients are seeing from your interlaced DVDs on their computer monitors is solely as a result of the poor deinterlacing done by their software DVD players. Poor results on the HDTVs may well be due to a combination of poor deinterlacing *and* poor upscaling done by the TV itself.
Progressive footage that is stored as interlaced on a DVD has data flags set that allow certain DVD players to perfectly reconstruct the progressive frames of the original footage. Hollywood’s DVDs are constructed this way. The number of hardware DVD players that have this capability is increasing as prices come down. So a decision to produce DVDs that contain progressive footage probably won’t hurt the majority of your clients, and may help the ones having trouble.
However, unless your source footage (that footage that comes off of the camera) is progressive, you must ensure that you use high-quality deinterlacing to process the video for final export. If you use Premiere Pro, you must not use its native deinterlacing because the quality is horrible compared to almost anything else.
Realize that you only have a certain amount of control over the quality that your clients end up seeing. More and more the quality of the presentation is dependent on how the audience sets up their display chain, and less dependent upon the author’s talent and technical skill. You can do everything just right, and still not be assured that your clients will get to see anything close to the original quality.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0
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I’m glad you liked the video. Mahalo! 🙂
I suggested random files as a test. I’m with you – I wouldn’t send a DVD with random stuff on it to a client. 😉
I assume you are using DVD-R blank media. Some players need a minimum of 1 GB of data when playing back -R media. You might want to think about using DVD+R, since the +R format doesn’t require a minimum size on any player that plays +R discs. It depends on your client(s) and their players.
For -R, duplicating the timelines is a good idea, if it fits in with the way the disc will be used.
No matter whether you add ROM content, or add extra timelines, anything that you put on the disc will be accessible to the audience in some way. It may not be easy for them, but it is possible.
ROM content can be found via Windows Explorer or the Finder on a Mac. Orphan timelines that aren’t linked to by any menu buttons or by any other timeline can still be accessed by direct number select on a remote or via pulldown menus on some software DVD players. And any DVD ripping software will find them.
-Jeff
The Focal Easy Guide to Adobe Encore DVD 2.0