DV Info Net - the art of encoding & transcoding

Hi everyone,

I read a lot of your posts here on the forums and often thought how lucky I am that I dont have (m)any of the many problems ppl here are facing. But today my luck changed. :(
I just finished editing a large corporate profile video , which looked all nice in PP CS3. Spent over 10 days of editing , color correcting , tweaking , etc...

I am learning the hard way the real 'art' seems to be in the encoding / transcoding. As long as I look on the encoded DVD on my computer using various DVD players (windows media player and some others) all is more or less fine. But once I bring my DVD and put it on my TV oh my god..... From bad colors, to flickering, jagged lines I seem to have any possible problem there is. Now let me describe:

I am in the PAL world and the video was all shot with a Canon XhA1. All went very well and I more than happy with what I see inside Premiere. For what its worth I am also using CineForm Prospect 2K - which I love by the way...

First I simply exported using the 'Prepare for Encore...' all automatic feature... which I alrd anticipated will not work that well. But how bad it really is was beyond my worst nightmares... I am surprised how such a fine product like Premiere Pro CS3 even would allow one to create such bad output. But anyway... So I started digging for information and I followed the workflow as suggested on the CineForm website for creating a DVD.
http://supportcenteronline.com/ics/s...asp?deptID=614

I alrd thought my problems will be solved and I will have a nice and relaxed weekend ahead of me... How wrong I have been.... :(

After following the steps suggested by CineForm I took the resulting file into Encore and did the rest there. Honestly I dont understand much about Encore (yet) and did not much fiddling around there. I used PAL DV High Quality 8MB CBR 1 Pass.. which, from what I have been told, is the thing to do.

Well, things got better but still very, very , very far from what I would consider satisfactory... still flickering and specially on sequences which have lots of movement things are really , really bad...

Then I made a few calls and was told to use Canopus ProCoder 3 coz as per what I have been told ProCoder output should be superior to Encore...

But it was not.
Besides writing this post I am also reading all sorts of manuals , various forums on the Internet. And what I learned so far is that this entire encoding / transcoding world a whole new 'can of worms'...

Any cure for me ?

It amazes me that despite all the sophistication we have in the world of video that there is no simple : 'make a nice looking DVD' from my high quality HDV video...
Am I asking for too much here ? Is the gild of video professionals guarding a holy grail of knowledge here ???
Am I asking for too much ?

Thx. for reading and thx in advance to all who will hopefully respond to this...

D! (Dominik)
www.d-imijis.com