DVD authoring
 

I can rent the more recent Hollywood blockbuster and it looks near HD on my 1080 plasma. If I author even a 3 minute clip in Encore it looks like a dvd from the 80's. From what I've read, companies make a business of owning the software and hardware to properly compress HD footage onto a DVD. How are people in the wedding business delivering quality DVD's to their costumers?

Greg,

This is a universal NLE problem that seems to occur in the resizing. I'm assuming that your source footage is HD.

There is a very long thread on the Vegas forum on this topic, but it is a universal solution using a Virtual Dub which has a resizing component. I'll track it down and post a link. The bottom line is it works way better - it's not hollywood, but it's waaaay better than your NLE resizer.

Haha... This thread has 198 replies and 25,000 views....

It is in the Vegas Forum - but so much of it is universal

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-hap...d-quality.html

It takes a bit of time to get through, but it's worth it. Perrone Ford gets the credit for the solution IMHO...

Great, Thanks. I'll sit down and study it.

Greg, I don't know if it's a universal problem but certainly in Avid there's no problem making extremely high quality DVDs from HDV originals.

The factor I see most often that results in poor quality DVDs is the knocking back of the bitrate to accommodate more material - I even have a competitor who reduces the bitrate in his Blu-ray output which of course look appalling.

As a policy we refuse to lower the bitrate to accommodate long programmes and include dual layer disk without surcharge if the programme duration demands it. That's not being pompoius but protecting our reputation - if people see a poor quality image they'll make their own decisions about the production company's expertise and not the demands of the client.

I have made a movie with the Adobe Master Suite and the DVD is equal to if not better than Hollywood quality. Also, I didn't use the 9Mbps maximum data rate, I just used 6.5. Plus I had menus, other featurettes and a director's commentary track as well.

I would suggest reading the Encore manual for excellent advice on how to cram in as much data as possible without losing quality. If your master is of great quality, then you can export to encore directly from premiere, and assuming you have done your bit calculations correctly, you will get a jaw-dropping image. Hope this helps.

The perceived wisdom I was given is that some players (older Sony models especially) won't handle anywhere near the maximum of 9200 Kbps in the spec.

TMPGEnc and others have limiters which hold the maximum to 8000Kbps.

I'll have to test it more tonight. Maybe my workflow was wrong. I either re-sized in premier by making a new sequence and used "fit Frame" and exported it to Encore, or I exported the 1080 video to Encore and let Encore take care of the resizing. Whichever option I choose did not give a good result.

I did try the vdub method and it worked, so just need to burn some more dvd's to make sure it plays.

How do you deal with the layer break in your dual-layer discs? I believe some software can allocate it to an 'allowed' area of your choice, but not down to the second.

The thought of a brief loss of picture/sound while the disc adjusts in the player is a bit of a concern - though I think some newer players might be smart enough to keep playback continuous during layer change with some sort of buffering.

Rob, frankly it's never been a problem. Most people are familiar with the layer shift pause from the films they rent or buy and so accept it. For the few who raise any objection we suggest it's a small penalty to pay for the convenience and cost saving of not paying for the authoring of a second single layer disk.

Like you I've heard mention of software that will allow you to dictate the layer change point but I'm very happy with the authoring system I use (TPMGEnc Authoring Works) to the point that any new program would have to have some pretty big advantages for me to change.

Incidentally we only changed to TAW when we discovered that our program of choice for many years (DVD-Lab) produced dual layer disks which wouldn't play the second layer correctly in Blu-ray players. The developers' dogged refusal to develop a version for Blu-ray because they don't think it'll catch on (rather like the Luddites of the 19th century) was what finally put the kibosh on DVD-Lab for me.

OK, going to be testing different setting today. For 5d footage, what should I be using for settings?


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Re: DVD authoring
 

Finally found the problem with my situation, might be of help if a customer calls you with the same weird situation. My antique dvd player was set to 4:3 from an old tv. On my recent tv I only noticed the quality issues on the widescreen dvd's I was burning. I've swithced the menu on my dvd to the correct 16:9 and problem solved.