After reading every post, well almost, on these forums and reading Spots book I have come to the conclusion that motion and mpeg compression do not work well together.

Now for the caveat, 90% of the video I shoot is of big game fishing. I have a blue marlin tearing up the ocean with leaps, jumps, greyhounding and in general thrashing at 60 mph all over the ocean. The mpeg nightmare, a subject in rapid motion with medium to quick pans.

Any suggestions how I could improve my shooting or editing technique to get the "best" picture" possible?

Thanks

Jim

I can't figure out exactly what your question is.

1- What camera are you using?
What format(s) does it shoot?

2- What format do you want to go to?

I presume you are shooting DV and want to compress a clip for the web? (And that you're using Vegas???) But I could be wrong...

I can't figure out exactly what your question is.

[QUOTE=Glenn Chan]1- What camera are you using?
I am using Sony FX1 and five fixed lenses connected to Sony MiniDV Decks.

2- What format do you want to go to?

DVD

The question is is there any shooting styles I can use or editing techniques that will produce the sharpest video possible.

Jim

Here's what I can think of:

1- Figure out if you are getting lots of motion artifacts during the capture/camera stage. If there are artifacts there then they cannot be gotten rid of and will be worsened when you re-compress the footage. Blurring the footage may kind of help.

2- Preventing motion artifacts at the capture stage:
A- Try to get low motion in the shot. If possible, devise a shoulder/body-mount for your camera or some other mount that works well with your shooting style. Or change your shooting style so that you hold the camera steadier.
If you shoot a little wider there'll be less camera motion (less panning and camera shake). This can be a good idea anyways, but too wide and you miss out on what's happening.

In the camera, turning down sharpening options may help?? Very high contrast edges often don't compress well.

3- Editing:
You can reduce the amount of motion blocking and other compression artifacts by:
A- Keeping the length of your piece down. This sometimes helps as it makes your entire piece tighter and flow faster. Figure out which parts are redundant and get rid of them.
Look at the whole structure of your piece and get rid of the parts that diverge from what you're trying to get across.
B- Use constant bitrate encoding at the maximum allowed for DVD (it's something like 7mbps). If you need to use a lower bitrate to fit more material onto the DVD, then a higher quality encoder will help avoid compression artifacts.

DVD needs MPEG-2, so you are stuck with that. Which MPEG-2 encoder are
you using now? You may want to take a look at TMPGEnc and Canopus Procoder,
which are considered very good encoders.

At which templates/settings are you encoding? Normally variable bitrate (VBR)
encoding will be better than constant bitrate (CBR) encoding. Also make sure
you are using high bitrates (like 8000 or 8 mbit).