I have Pinnacle Studio 8 SE, but a friend has Nero DVD and notices the same thing - even at the highest quality setting, on the finished DVD there is added video noise. Not a huge amount, but enough to be seen, especially in scenes that are poorly lit. The result is that DVDs look more like good quality Super-VHS, a far cry from the quality seen on most commercial DVDs.

Is this a factor of the software? Do we just have to live with video noise generated by consumer-level MPEG encoders?

I was hoping to see no degredation compared to the DV master.

What settings are you using? Do those encoders support
VBR encoding?

Both Vegas and Premiere seem to come with pretty good
encoders these days. But for the top of the line check these out:

1. Canopus ProCoder (www.canopus.com) (Express). Probably the best. Medium/cheap price

2. CCE (www.cinemacraft.com). Also one of the best. Expensive

3. TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.net). Pretty good and cheap

You can download demo's for each if I remember correctly.

Quality depends largely on the quality of your source, the
quality of the encoder and your settings. Two-pass VBR is usually
better than CBR encoding for example.

DVD is highly compressed and you will see the effects of this
more easily on a computer monitor then you will on a TV. Always
watch on where the most people are going to watch it.

With the right tools, source footage and settings you should be
able to make very good DVD's.

Hollywood has special encoders that you can exactly tell where
to put the bits and is (can be) a very involved process. They are
still ahead of us, but not by much if your source footage is up to
spec.

Keep in mind that poorly lit scenes are one of the hardest things
(and sharp lines) to encode with MPEG and DV.

Chris,

What camera did you use?

Are you viewing the original video - on a TV or a computer monitor?

I use a sony Digital 8 DCR-TRV720. My friend uses a Sony VX1000. My D8 looks okay, especially with good lighting. His VX1000 is of course a couple of notches better.

The camcorder isn't the problem... both of us have noticed a slight degradation in picture quality when viewing the DVD versus camcorder hookup on our respective TVs, via the S-video jack.

The products we've been using (Nero, Pinnacle Studio) don't allow for variable bit rate, so could that be a cause?

in general, you shouldn't see much picture degredation at all, when going from dv to dvd.

in addition to all the other suggestions, take a look at the mainconcept mpeg encoder... overall, it's one of the best combo's of picture quality and ease of use that you will find.

Chris, how long is the video? Studio drops its CBR rate to match the size if it is over an hour. You would then drop below 6000kbs.

Also, did you capture in full quality mode or preview mode? Just checking as you probably did full quality.

I captured in full quality... I tried to max out everything in order to get the best possible result, since the movie was only 33 minutes.

It's probably a function of the low-end software. I might try some of the suggestions given, plus I'm expecting Media Studio Pro 7 in the mail any day now (which has a DVD authoring module built in).