poor picture quality

[jasonjog]

When I burn a movie to DVD the image is not sharp. Moving objects (legs, arms) blur acorss the screen and appear a little jerky. This is not high speed movement, just people walking or moving their arms.

After using Pinnacle Studio 9 which had almost crystal clear picture quality I am disappointed with the blurry images I am getting with VS10+.

DVD is blurry both on TV and when watched on computer.

I have followed the advice in the sticky to match the project properties, etc.

Using external 250Gb hard drive (Freecom), XP, 1.7GHz RAM. Using JVC GR-D70 mini DV camcorder and have followed advice to capture and burn lower field first. Am in PAL country. All this equipment produce very sharp results with Pinnacle, but that was a struggle to edit.

Have installed VS10 on C:drive, while captured video and project are on G:, would this affect it?

Any advice gratefully received.

[DVDDoug]

Have installed VS10 on C:drive, while captured video and project are on G:, would this affect it?

No. It's just digital data. ...Unless there was a capture problem.... If your G external G drive is too slow. This could be the case because the drive and camera are sharing the Firewire, or because the data has to be "translated" from Firewire to USB. But, your captured footage is OK, right? I really think if your external drive was too slow for capture, the data would be so screwed-up that it wouldn't even play!

It sounds like a field-order problem, or a that the MPEG bitrate was too low. Or, you've encoded the MPEG twice. Slow motion can be trickier than fast motion, expecially when panning across a a complex scene/background.... With fast motion, you don't have time to see the defects.

have followed the advice in the sticky to match the project properties, etc.

And, those properties are???? Did you dapture to MPEG or to AVI/DV?

[heinz-oz]

How exactly did you get the footage into Pinnacle? What was the capture format? DV-AVI, AVI, mpeg? What did you do with it after?
Did you re-capture the footage with VS from your tapes or did you use the footage from Pinnacle?

If the latter, what did you do to it inside Pinnacle? Converted to mpeg?

[jasonjog]

Thanks DVDDoug,
The captured footage is fine. I'm sure the external drive is fine - it's the same speed as the internal and USB2 connected. I'll check out the field order. Maybe check the make project settings same as captured footage??

How do I check that I haven't encoded the MPEG twice?

These are the project properties I chose. Also chose 100% quality.
PAL (25 fps)
Microsoft AVI files
24 bits, 720 x 576, 4:3, 25 fps
Lower Field First
DV Video Encoder -- type 1
DV Audio -- PAL, 32.000 kHz, 12 Bit, Stereo

heinz-oz,
I captured to AVI format for ease of editing. Captured using firewire. Also have re-captured the footage from the tapes using VS10 capture.

[jchunter]

Jason,
Your project properties are fine.
After editing your DV video, you have to create an Mpeg2 video file, with Mpeg2 properties, of the whole project before burning on DVD.

Good properties for PAL Mpeg2 video files are:
MPEG files
24 Bits, 720 x 576, 25 fps
Lower Field First
(DVD-PAL), 4:3 (or 16:9 for widescreen)
Video data rate: Variable (Max. 8000 kbps)
Audio data rate: 224 kbps
MPEG audio layer 2, 48 KHz, Stereo

Be sure to manually set matching Mpeg2 BURN properties in the Create Disk module.