Hi guys I have Adobe Encore 5.5 and have a question.

I have a progressive SD video (720 by 480 widescreen, AVI) that I would like to put on DVD. When I encode it either with the progressive setting or the interlace setting, it seems to lack detail and have jaggies sometimes. Any suggestions?

The original file looks great - once its encoded for DVD it looks a bit worse.

Here is the problem:

Encore mis-interprets all standard-definition video as interlaced lower-field-first on import. Worse, you're stuck with LFF because there is absolutely no way at all whatsoever to re-interpret the correct field order of such imported video. Someone has filed a bug report with Adobe some time ago about this.

I may be able to make another file instead of AVI if that would help the problem??

I may be able to make another file instead of AVI if that would help the problem??
Yes, one way is to use Adobe Media Encoder and transcode the file to MPEG2-DVD and making sure to use Progressive as the Field Order. Once that file is imported into Encore, it won't be transcoded.

Hi guys I have Adobe Encore 5.5 and have a question.

I have a progressive SD video (720 by 480 widescreen, AVI) that I would like to put on DVD. When I encode it either with the progressive setting or the interlace setting, it seems to lack detail and have jaggies sometimes. Any suggestions?

The original file looks great - once its encoded for DVD it looks a bit worse.

I just rechecked, and found out that the MPEG-2 encoder in Encore or Premiere Pro just isn't very good at compression quality at their preset defaults. None of the included presets are set to perform 2-pass VBR encoding, for starters (their defaults are set to 1-pass VBR or to CBR, depending on the preset used).

Silas....

The first culprit to bad DVD encodes are usually, when there's a pixel aspect ratio change. AME does a terrible job at this.
The second culprit, is that the playback software isn't designed to playback correctly. So your encodes should be within spec. You didn't mention what playback software you're using.
What you probably see is flatter color, and inferior deinterlacing.

There seems to be a misconception with progressive vs. interlaced encoding.
Here's the deal.

A progressive encode allows the encoder to do a different scan over the frame. It is a different pattern.
It has more to do with efficiency of bitrate, and encoding technique, than quality.

But yes, rule of thumb, is progressive footage should be scanned progressively, and interlaced footage, as interlaced.
As far as 1vbr vs. 2 vbr..
I find that AME does an fine job with 1 vbr, assuming the bitrate amount is sufficient for your picture.
If you've filmed a bowl of fruit for an hour, why would you need to crank it to 9mbps at 2 vbr??

But once you've burned onto DVD, and watch it on a set top player, then you'll see the difference.