VideoStudio 10plus: Project preferences (PAL) & compress

[Liam]

G'Day

I have just started using VideoStudio 10 plus and must be doing something wrong because the rendered DVD video quality is jolty compared with Windows Movie Maker. I hope someone can help me.

I am capturing video & audio (MPEG-4) off my digital camera at 30fps and 640x480 dpi. The unrendered video appears fine. When I set the project preferences to PAL (25fps & 720x576), I live in Australia, and render the video to DVD it appear jolted. What preference should I use (MPEG-2 640x480 30fps perhaps)?

Also 17 minutes of video is using 950MB when rendered to DVD. How do I get the reported 4hrs of video on DVD??

Thanks so much for your help!
Liam.[/b]

[Ron P.]

Hi Liam, and welcome to the forums..

First, editing MPEG4 which is a highley compressed fomat is going to be extremely difficult to do with success. You are seeing one of the problems that occur when this format is edited. If possible you could transcode to MPEG2, (DVD Compliant). There is a difference between MPEG-2 and DVD-Compliant MPEG-2. The resolutions, bitrates of the video and audio must meet the criteria set out for DVD if that is going to be your final result.

Since you are located in Australia, you would of course use PAL. The resolution should be 720 x 576 with a frame rate of 25fps. Your audio settings could be Dolby Digital (AC3 or 5.1 surround).

The small file size you are getting for the 17 minutes of video are due to the compression being used. The higher the compression the smaller the file size. For exampe DV, often referred to as DV-AVI, is a compressed AVI, that yields file sizes of about 13 gig per hour. Uncompressed AVI, yields about 65 gig per hour. Then when you create your video file for burning to disc, depending on what codecs (compression-decompression) are used, what bitrates for your audio and video, would compress a DV file down to a size that can be burned to a disk.

After you have edited your captured video, then when you go to Share>Create Video File, OR if you try to burn from the timeline, the Video file needs to be created, and to the DVD standards in order to be burned onto a DVD disk. So in your case, the MPEG-4 file must be re-encoded. Since this is a highley compressed format, it must be decompressed, then recompressed, which can result in loss of quality, audio sync problems, and jerky playback..

For further reading you might want to view Steve's excellent tutorial From Camcorder to DVD which can be found here:

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=13421

Ron P.

[Ken Berry]

A couple of weeks ago, I had a similar query from someone in Brisbane, who actually sent me some of the video he was playing with, which was also mpeg-4 downloaded from a digital still camera. It too was in exactly the same format you have. I managed to convert it to DVD-compatible mpeg-2 simply by using the default settings for this in VS10+. The rendered settings were 720 x 576 and 25 fps, and the result was quite good. So it is possible. Since I used default settings, I am not sure what advice I can give beyond this. But as Vidoman has already said, make sure when you go to Share > Create Video File, that you select 'PAL DVD' and NOT mpeg-2 as the format for the latter is not necessarily DVD-compliant.

As for your question about 4 hours of video on a DVD (and single layer at that), I suspect you are thinking not of a standard DVD (which, at single layer, can only fit around 2 hours of acceptable quality). But you are thinking instead of an mpeg-4 DVD, which is a relatively new format. Essentially, it uses codecs like DivX and XVid which are much more compressed than mpeg-2, yet retain high quality. Given the extremely high compression, you can naturally fit a lot more on a DVD -- 4 hours or even more, depending on your own view of the quality produced.

The main problem has been that until relatively recently, you could only play these sorts of disc on your computer because there were not many stand-alone DVD players which could play them. But now there are quite a lot, even here in Australia, and the price has also fallen markedly. I just bought, 2 days ago here in Canberra, an LG dual VCR/DVD player which will play not only standard DVDs, but also DivX and XVid DVDs. And it cost A$159 (around US$105). Stand-alone DVD players that will do the same thing are going for less than A$100 (US$74).

In other words, for your current project, you could actually download and process your files in mpeg-4 format and output them in the same format for burning to disc. I would use DivX for this simply because I have the DivX Pro codec on my computer, but it is easy enough to get other codecs such as XVid. This will be fine if you have a stand-alone player which will play them. But if you intend to distribute them widely, then you will need to bear in mind that your friends will need to have DivX-capable players or else will only be able to play them on their computers (as long as their computers also have the relevant codec!)