DVD Tweaks for Viewing SD on HDTV?

[mndoc]

I have been following the recommended procedures for producing DVD's with Version 10+. My project parameters are listed below, the DVD's work well and look great on a SD TV but miserable on a Samsung 46" LCD 1080P HDTV. Commercial SD DVD's however are spectacular using the same progressive scan DVD player (no upconversion available). Any suggestions to improve the quality of my projects without moving to HD yet? I capture to either MPEG or DVI with the same results, deinterlacing is checked, no significant difference with square or non-square pixels. Video and Stills appears grainy with significant digital noise, motion and audio is fine. Thanks for any suggestions.

NTSC drop frame (29.97 fps)
MPEG files
24 bits, 720 x 480, 29.97 fps
Lower Field First
(DVD-NTSC), 16:9
Video data rate: Variable (Max. 8000 kbps)
LPCM Audio, 48000 Hz, Stereo

[skier-hughes]

I'm not an expert on this, but you have a tv which shows progressive, have interlacing turned off, but have lower field first - this doesn't sound right to me, shouldn't you have frame based (think that's what it's called.)

Other than that it could just be the way it's going to be displayed on such a huge tv - lucky devil!!!

[jchunter]

The first question is whether your video capture files and the DVD burn have the same project properties that you listed. If so, they are fine for the video and your regular TV, as you observed.

Your still photos will be downrezed to the 720x480 frame size, and, thus, will not look as good as they could on HDTV. Be sure you set the resampling quality to BEST, set Keep Aspect Ratio, and uncheck Image Capture Deinterlace, unless you have captured the stills from an interlaced video frame, in the project Preferences. You must have Non-Square pixels set, when creating the video file and DVD.

I have never seen noise on my jpegs. I drop jpegs at full res into the timeline. You could bump up the video bitrate to 9800Kbps, using mpeg2 template, which would help somewhat (for output video file and DVD).

To get the best still photos on HDTV, you need to increase the frame size to 1920x1080p, field order Frame-Based, and may have to show them separately from the video, which is limited to standard def quality. (You need a different kind of playback device for HD frame size.)

However, once you have gotten used to HD quality, standard definition doesn't look good any more...

[mndoc]

Thanks for the suggestions, I did keep the video capture and burn properties the same. I assume that a DVD destined for playback on a progressive scan DVD player to a progressive scan compatible TV should be deinterlaced, is this correct and should I use the standard field order for digitial video or use the frame based selection?

[jchunter]

I do see smother pans and zooms on progressive displays, when I deinterlace (Field Order = Frame Based). However, I'm working with HD video that seems to make interlace artifacts more obvious.

I also see smoother motion on my CRT-based Pioneer HDTV (RPTV) but the explanation for this is unclear. That TV should be able to display interlaced video properly by displaying the two interlaced fields 1/60 sec. apart in time (60 Fields per second = 30 Frames per second), which should provide smooth motion for interlaced video.

The root cause may lie in my Link DVD player (IOData AVLP2), which uses firmware to decompress the HD video, in real time, and may not be able to keep up, (e.g., when the video bitrate peaks).

In your case, your progressive LCD HDTV and DVD player may try to display two interlaced fields at the same instant of time (actually recorded 1/60 sec apart in time), which would make each FRAME appear as a double exposure, 30 times per second. It leems logical that deinterlacing would yield smoother motion. If it does not, then you may need to look into a different deinterlacer or DVD player...

Here are some links to more info on interlaced video:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video
http://www.3drender.com/glossary/fields.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinterlacing

Edit: This link is better for showing interlace / deinterlace artifacts.
http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/tre ... orial.html