NOT ABLE TO GET GOOD QUALITY DVDs HELPPPPPPP

[Morgan Preston]

I have tried a few things and kinda need some info on what some others are doing. I get my edit to the full resolution master on Lumiere and then use compressor to do a high quality encode for DVD and the final product is JUNK. The best looking stuff I have gotten is by using the full resolution 720p timeline and export it to quick time conversion, I then pick 720 by 480 and get a standard definition .mov. I then make my dvd's with this.....this seems to work and the stuff looks pretty good...or at least livable......but at the Lumiere website it says that progressive scan DVD's can be made from the High Resolution rendered master using compressor....I have had no such luck and I have been using the same footage for comparisons and the stuff from the master looks like hell. Am I missing a step? At what point should it be converted to SD for use on the DVD, from the 720p timeline or from the master?
Any help would be appreciated.......such as your workflow from the master etc etc blah blah blah.
Thanks in advance
MP
(by the way the MASTER looks freakin' incredible, I just need to be able to use this besides watching at the edit bay)

[David Newman]

The down scale to SD can be at any stage as this must be done before the MPEG compression for DVD. Are the quality issues you are seeing a scaling (are edges aliasing) or compression artifact? Sorry I don't know about the Mac workflow, but I do know DVD created from the HD10U can look incredible. The quality of the down scale is key.

[Morgan Preston]

The problem is a crawling background.........very pixely lines with movement is the problem I get when using compressor to make the hidef master into an m2v. So I need to convert to 720 by 480 off the timeline is that what you're saying? How would you downscale it? I use qucktime conversion.

[Frederic Lumiere]

Morgan,

The good news is that if your master looks incredible, you are very close to a great looking DVD.

Based on your description it sounds like settings you choose in your encoding.

Here's a few things to double check:

1. Make sure the master is made from the m2v 720p timeline and not the dv timeline.

2. Render the timeline to uncompressed HD or DC 30 4:2:2 codec

3. Choose highest quality Widescreen DVD from the compressor preset (Dual scan)

What version of compressor do you have? The latest optimizes HD > SD Progressive Scan.

[Bryan Suthard]

Frederic.

In compressor I always choose the MPEG2 60 minute High quality encode Widescreen.

There are options for 90 and 120 minutes also. I assume those are at lower qualities to fit the space on a 4.7 Gig DVD so I never choose them. Am I right in that thinking?

I am using compressor 1.2 and my results look very good but I do not have a lot to compare to.

Bryan

[Frederic Lumiere]

<<<-- Originally posted by Bryan Suthard : Frederic.
There are options for 90 and 120 minutes also. I assume those are at lower qualities to fit the space on a 4.7 Gig DVD so I never choose them. Am I right in that thinking?
Bryan -->>>

Bryan,

Yes you are correct. 60 minutes will yield better results than 90 or 120 minutes.

Frederic

[Tom Roper]

He is describing classic moire'

Moiré is an example of "false contouring", where two patterns that are slightly different or at slightly different angles are laid on top of each other. For example, if you see a striped pattern through a set of venetian blinds, the stripes turn into a pattern of dots. Your brain tries to "connect the dots" and you often see lines and curves that are not there in the blinds or in the striped pattern behind the blinds. These are called "false contours." Video is especially susceptible to this, because the scan lines themselves act a lot like venetian blinds, so when you see a regular pattern that is at an angle to the scan lines, wiggling or shimmering lines can appear on the screen. The higher the resolution of the image, the less moiré you notice, because the image looks smoother and your brain sees the true contours more strongly than the false contours.

When a deinterlacer is in video mode and the image is moving, it's more susceptible to moiré, because the image has fundamentally less resolution. The deinterlacer is only working with a single 240-line field, and a 240-line image is going to show moiré much more strongly than a 480-line image. This is one reason that you want your deinterlacer to stay in film mode as much as possible.

And that's the quandry with DVD playback, especially for HDV video, is that deinterlacers in U.S. (not Pal) DVD players are mostly poor at properly decoding the 2:2 cadence of 30fps progressive video, and thus drop out of the film mode, into the video mode where the single 240 line field exacerbates the playback problem. People in PAL countries don't notice this, because 2:2 cadence is very common in Europe.

Source:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html

[Tom Roper]

I am thus in agreement that DVDs are problematic for downconverted video to varying degrees.

-Not problematic at all for nature photography where the image is comprised of mostly random non-geometric shapes

to

-Very problematic if the image does consist of angular and geometric shapes combined with panning motions.


The best solution I've found, is to encode my video into high quality Windows Media Video HD, (WM9) at native 1280x720 30 fps progressive, and archive on DVD media.

The WM9 compatible DVD players are on the way soon enough.

[Frederic Lumiere]

Uncompressed 10 bit HD will turn out beautifully on DVD.

[Paul Mogg]

Hi Folks,
A couple of things. I really agree with Frederic that 10 bit uncompressed is a very good way to go with your final online of HDV edited material, especially if you're looking for the very best results. In expermenting with this I found that using 10 bit over 8 bit (uncompressed) gave significantly better results when I was doing a lot of color correction and compositing several layers of HDV material. By that I mean less unwanted artifacts generated, and less chroma noise that is often induced when color correcting HDV, which has quite a bit of noise in it to start with.
I've also found that compressing MPEG2 directly from an uncompressed 10 bit HD master, using Apple's 2 pass VBR encoder can produce quite incredible results on DVD that seem to maintain much more of the original HD detail in the SD DVD.
Tom, you sound quite knowledgeable on the DVD deinterlacing issue so I wanted to ask you a basic question that's been bugging me. Am I correct that when a progressive scan DVD player plays back a DVD with 30p or 24p material encoded on it, it is playing back 480p material, which is an HDTV standard, not NTSC or PAL which are interlaced standards by definition. Therefore, if you do not play this material back on an HDTV capable monitoring device, or one that is capable of displaying a progressive image, you will not be seeing the progressive scan effect at all. It seems to me that (if I am correct) a lot of people, who are connecting their nice new progressive scan DVD players to an NTSC or PAL TV set, are not aware that they are not seeing a progressive image at all. Is this correct?
Also, if this is correct, how does the DVD player know if the TV it is connected to is capable of displaying a progressive image?, and so decide on whether or not to deinterlace the signal before output. Or does the TV set do this generally? I'm pretty confused on this, as must be obvious.

Thanks

Paul

[Phil Wright]

Paul,

Your DVD player always puts out interlaced NTSC/PAL output on its composite and/or s-video ports. A DVD player capable of progressive scan output will only do so from the component or DVI outputs.

" Am I correct that when a progressive scan DVD player plays back a DVD with 30p or 24p material encoded on it, it is playing back 480p material, ..."

Correct unless you have one of the more recent DVD players that will also upscale SD content to HD resolutions.

"It seems to me that (if I am correct) a lot of people, who are connecting their nice new progressive scan DVD players to an NTSC or PAL TV set, are not aware that they are not seeing a progressive image at all. "

I don't know if they are unaware or how many actually believe they might be getting progressive scan but you are correct again in that they are just seeing the same ol' interlaced TV display they always had.

"...how does the DVD player know if the TV it is connected to is capable of displaying a progressive image?, and so decide on whether or not to deinterlace the signal before output."

When connected via the digital DVI connection a DVD player can determine the capabilities of the display device just like a modern PC does with a PC monitor. But some DVD players are going to leave it all to manual control by the user.

[Paul Mogg]

Thank you for the explanation Phil.

[Tom Roper]

Well said Phil.