DVDA or ?
 

If money was no object and I wanted to get the best possible compression known to man that is not blue ray for DVD release would it within DVDA? I need my spring release on DVD to be the best possible imagery coming from SD environment which was originally a dump down from 1080i Vegas timeline. It seems like every disc DVDA spits out is several levels below the source file in quality...?

If money was no object I'd start evaluating the L.A. DVD compression and authoring services.

While our Vegas/DVDA workflows can produce pretty good results, none of this prosumer software can compare with the experience and capability of the people doing feature work using hardware-based compression.

The LA-411 guide is one place to start.

thats kinda what i figured. And dont get me wrong, costs is ALWAYS an issue, but I wonder how bad they'd hit us for killer compression and authoring... will let you know. Thanks.

Fred did you try burning the DVDA discs as slow as the machine would go? Those pits need need to be great pits with nice square edges on all of 'em. And the blank disc quality plays a part.

Cheers.

not yet...I will tonight though. nice call.

Also remember that DVD Architect can't do as good compression as Vegas can.

I never use DVD Architect for compression since it can't do 2-pass VBR, while Vegas can do that. Vegas also has tweakable settings for the AC-3, which DVD Architect doesn't have.

For the best quality you should do your MPEG-2 and AC-3 encoding in Vegas, not DVD Architect.

Beyond using Vegas, my favorite affordable encoder software is TMPGEnc, which I feed with the DebugMode Frameserver from Vegas for my encoding. I find its quality better than the already good MainConcept encoder in Vegas.

Actually DVDA does better with AVC because it doesn't limit the choice of bit rates.

I think for AVC it actually is doing a 2-pass, but not giving you a choice in the matter. It's slow as wet paint, but highly variable. I see you do XDCAM. So do I. Try feeding it .mxf, either from your cam or watch Vegas losslessly no-recompress it. For a 18 mbps average bit rate AVC, it could peak within the range of 2 to 34 mbps vbr, very impressive. The AVC rendering quality I see out of DVDA is better than Vegas, and I've tried every combination of Vegas AVC from mainconcept to Sony codecs. You should still use Vegas for the AC3 encoding a separate elementary stream, which you can select within DVDA apart from the video stream.

For mpeg-2, I agree with you 100%

Oh, thanks for the info, I didn't realize that about AVC in DVDA. I was only basing what I said on my MPEG-2 experiences.

Yes, smart rendering of XDCAM HD MXF in Vegas is very nice.

Darn it! I wish I'd seen this before. This would explain why I've not been able to get the quality quite as good as from ManDVD on Linux.