Workflow from capture to publish
 

I am just starting in the world of Wedding and Event Videography. I love the excitement and emotion of weddings and feel privileged to be able to provide a record of the day. And I don't mind the long hours either. I am having trouble though with my project delivery. Viewing quality on DVD is not as good as I would expect - either pixelated or blurry. Looks fine in the camera and when viewing via the editor so I'm sure the problem lies in the project preset, interpretation/conversion, or the output preset.

I am shooting on a Canon HF G30, movie format: AVCHD, Recording Mode: 24 Mbps, frame rate: PF 29.97 (which manual says is progressive recorded as 59.94i), resolution at these settings is 1920x1080.

NLE is Adobe Premiere Elements 10 (planning to upgrade to CC but haven't yet). I have tried several project presets, tried interpretation options on source, and several options when sharing to DVD. None have provided a clear video when I ultimately burn to a DVD. It appears that most Wedding Videographers in my area offer DVD as their delivery method. What am I missing?

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

How long are your finished edits? If they are more than about 70 minutes, the programme may well be compressing them down to fit on the dvd, resulting in pixelation, jerkiness on movement etc. You could try writing a short clip to dvd and see how that looks.

Roger

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

Hi Valerie,

First thought is that "pixelated" sounds like you're scaling up the image on playback. So, first thing to check -- are you certain you're exporting to DVD-sized resolution, and not smaller?

Second thought is: are there quality settings you can adjust on encoding? Or perhaps bitrate settings?

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

This particular edit is approximately 36 minutes long.

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

I'm pretty certain I'm exporting to DVD-sized resolution. I'm using a preset of NTSC_DOLBY DVD, space required is 2.26gb with a 8.00 Mbps bitrate.

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

Hi Valerie,

How exactly are you viewing the DVD? If using an older DVD player with the yellow RCA composite output feeding an HD display, this will always look bad. Get a DVD player with hardware upscaling and HDMI output. Or better yet, a Blu-ray player, $60 at Sam's. These have hardware to convert the SD content to HD before sending out via HDMI. If you send SD composite to the display, it just "blows it up" and looks nasty.

Thanks

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

36 minutes would be no problem compression wise for dvd play, so unless you have a problem with playback equipment it must be with the rendering settings.

I'm not familiar with the output settings for dvd on Premiere Elements, so is the programme setting an auto level of compression for dvd or do you have to manually set it? If you are first manually setting the MPEG2 compression and size settings then sending to dvd, that is almost certainly where the problem is. I use Magix ProX6 which sizes the file to the dvd, so don't see your sort of problem.

Roger

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

Hmmm. I am viewing with an older DVD player with the yellow RCA composite output feeding an HDTV - that explains why that looks so bad. I also have a Blu-ray player using HDMI to the HDTV - it still is marginal. I believe the Blu-ray player and TV are both 2010 models.

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

Program is setting the compression for DVD. I do not set anything manual on the back end. Prior to edit I have to select as project preset option. I am using one of the AVCHD presets (since I am importing AVCHD footage). Preset has: editing mode HD 1080i, frame size: 1920x1080, PAR: square (1.0), No fields (progressive scan), 30fps drop-frame timecode. Does that help?

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

Not really, as I am more concerned about how the MPEG2 is being compressed. 1080 AVCHD footage would be well above the quality of an MPEG 2 dvd file and is what I use for my own footage. I do recall having a version of Premiere Elements about 3 years ago that I tried for a while and one of the things that I really disliked was that the dvds were nowhere near the quality that I was getting from other programmes. It could be that the MPEG 2 encoder is just not very good, I stopped using it pretty quickly.

It might be worth downloading a free trial version of a different editing programme, perhaps Sony Vegas or similar. You could then render a short clip out to dvd and see how it looks compared to Premiere Elements. Personally I love Magix ProX6 but I think I am the only one on this forum as it is a bit quirky to get your head around.

Roger

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

You shoot in MPEG2? I can shoot in AVCHD or MP4. Thought I was picking the better of the two options. Maybe I should switch over. I have been planning to upgrade to Adobe Premiere Pro so maybe now is the time for a trial version of that software. Fortunately the two wedding I have finished editing can be put out on blu-ray so I shouldn't have a compression problem there. I have minimal edit involved in this current project so I can redo it very quickly in another piece of software to see if the burn provides better results. Thanks for the help.

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

I think you misread my post as I shoot in 1080 AVCHD just as you do, but my concern would be what codecs Premiere Elements is using for mpeg2 compression. Definitely time for an upgrade I think.

Roger

Re: Workflow from capture to publish
 

I thought I had misread, thanks for confirming.