Bad Quality DVD

[aj]

You probably won't be able to help me as I can see from this board that you only seem to be able to help people who can give you loads of tecnical info and as I am a complete novice, I can't give you that. But as I have tried everything else and am about to throw the computer out of the window, I thought I would try.

I have been trying to burn a DVD of movie clips captured on my stills camera (which obviously does both still photos and movie clips). It's a panasonic dmc fz20.

I have loaded the clips onto my computer. I think the format they seem to be in is quick time movie clips.

I have worked through the book which came with Video studio 8 missing out the 'capture' section as I already have the clips on my computer. When I finally burned the DVD though, it worked out fine EXCEPT that the actual movie clip quality was awful. The pictures were all pixellated and very bad. I know this isn't a problem with the clips themselves as I've seen them a lot better quality so obviously I have some setting or something wrong.

Coming on this site, I read the top section and followed the other instructions (which are different / more in depth to what it says in the book). Again I didn't do the capture section as I already have the clips. Are my clips in the wrong format? It says the clips should be in either AVI or MPeg format which I assume mine are not???

I worked through these instructions but after checking the 'show message when inserting first clip...' box, I then inserted a clip by opening a file and inserting the clip, but nothing happened. Nothing came up to ask me if I wanted to set properties to match. I did do everything else right though I think.

When I came to burn the DVD it burned in about 20 seconds though (I had only put a very short clip on though to try it out) which didn't seem long enough to burn anything. Then when I tried playing the DVD in my player, it said it couldn't find anything on the disk.

HELP! Is there anything that anyone can suggest I'm doing wrong? I can answer questions if you need more info and can tell me in simple / straightforward steps / language. I'd be very grateful for any help you could give me.

Abbie

[GeorgeW]

Hi,

Great digital "stills" camera (nice combination of optical zoom and image stabilization), but captured video is at a low resolution of 320x240 (I hope you at least captured at 30fps, and not 10 fps).

If you plan to include more video on your discs, I would recommend using a camcorder instead that would capture much higher quality footage.

That said, I would look to create a video that matches the resolution of your camera video -- perhaps a VCD at 352x240, or even a DVD using mpeg1 at 352x240.

Try a small clip in a VCD project (not a DVD project). Burn that to a regular CD-R/RW, and see if your DVD Player can playback VCD's.

George

[THoff]

We had a discussion about digital stills on the old board, and at that time I created a sample project, which you can still find here. The quality of digital still images when used in a DVD project is actually quite good, but there are a few things you need to look out for.

Primarily, in the UVS Preferences, make sure you set the resampling quality to "Best" to get the maximum quality when resizing images.

Second, configure UVS to keep the aspect ration of the picture. This will usually result in a black border around the image, but at least it won't get distorted. If this is not acceptable, you will need to crop the image and select a region that fits your DVD project (720x480 for NTSC, 720x576 for PAL).

[aj]

Thank you both for your help. I'll have a look through it and see what I can try out.

Hi,
I hope you at least captured at 30fps, and not 10 fps

Yes, I'm pretty sure I did capture at 30fps. It was pretty good quality anyway when I played it straight back from the camera to the TV.

If you plan to include more video on your discs, I would recommend using a camcorder instead that would capture much higher quality footage.

Wish I could but the clips I took were at concerts and unfortunately they don't like people using camcorders

Abbie

[Ken Berry]

Apart from the foregoing comments by others, with which I agree, I was not totally clear on the format of the video clips you were taking on your still camera: you say they are Quicktime, so does that mean they have the .mov extension? Or some other extension? (Find one of the files on your computer, right click on it and choose Properties -- this should tell you.)

Also, do you have the latest version of Quicktime player on your computer? VS8, if I recall correctly, requires at least version 5.4 (or is it 5.6?), and the current version is 6.5.2.

If you indeed have .mov files, then you need to convert them into MPG format for burning either to VCD/SVCD or DVD. With the clip or clips in the timeline, select SHARE > Create Video File > VCD (or MPEG 1 for DVD) with the properties mentioned above. Play back the file which is produced and see if it is pixelated. If it isn't, then try a test burn with an RW disc to see how it comes out (and to avoid wasting a disc). Good luck.

[aj]

Thank you for all your help. I have tried this out and have now unfortunately come up with another problem which I can't figure out. Everything works fine until I try to put the burned DVD into my DVD player. Basically it says that the DVD is blank (and trying it on another DVD player it just doesn't recognise the disc). I don't think it's the type of disc (DVD-RW) as this is what I used from the start and what came up with the pixellated version. Has anybody got any help / advice for this?

Many thanks.

Abbie

[kebrinton]

Hi Abbie --

One thing I would like to know is, how big is the final video file, pre-burn? When you look at the file in Windows Explorer and have the "details" option on, how many megabytes or gigabytes large is it?

Burning in 30 seconds doesn't strike me as right, if you have video files. Sounds like you burned the .VSP project file instead of the video file -- and I really don't mean to be rude.

Can you try using a CD instead of a DVD? If you only have about 15 minutes of movie, at a VHS-level of quality, you can make VCDs instead of wasting DVDs and get the same quality (since you are limited by the .MOV files you are using).