Picture quality on preview screen looks massively compressed

[RickNolletti]

I'm rather frustrated. I messed around with this software program at a friend's house and thought it was very cool & graphic, so I went out and spent some serious bucks on it. In my first attempt to author a client's video, I captured the program with my VT 4. Then I imported the file and was horrified when I watched it on The Preview screen-massive compression despite the fact that I'd captured it into the Toaster as an uncompressed AVI file.
Next I thought I might have better luck capturing through the DVD worshop 2. I went through and tried to optimize the "options" settings; however, when I began the capturing process, the picture quality still looked horrendously compressed. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Is the quality viewed on the preview screen indicative of the same quality when you output to a DVD

[GeorgeW]

I think the Preview screen can look pretty bad at times (i.e. not as good as the final product).

I would create a small test project with one of your "action" shots (5-10 minutes should do). Burn the project and watch it on a real DVD Player -- this will give you a better idea of final quality.

Just remember that there are other factors to final quality (i.e. quality of original source videos, your capture quality, and your encoding method/bitrates).

Regards,
George

[DVDDoug]

The most important paramater that you have control over is the bitrate.

A couple of reference points:

A bitrate of around 6000kbps is "typical" for commercial DVDs. The pros have better MPEG encoders,so they can get better quality out of 6000kbps than we can. But, 6000 with the Ulead encoder looks quite good to me. With 6000kbps video and Dolby audio, you can get about 90 minutes on a single-layer DVD.

The maximum combined audio & video bitrate allowed by the DVD spec is slightly over 10,000. But, some DVD players have trouble with "burned" DVDs above 8000. So, 8000 is the usually maximum recommended here.

If you go below 4000kbps, I think you'll start to notice the degradation. But, it depends on the program material, the quality of your TV, and how picky you are. (I think I've got some commercial DVDs that are around 4000, but I haven't analyzed all of my commercial DVDs... That might be an intersting project...)

If your DVD player will play R/W (erasable) DVDs, you won't waste and blank DVDs making test projects as George recommended. I'll often burn a R/W DVD first, just to see what it's going to look like on a TV, or to make sure I've got all of the menus & playlists set-up correctly. (The NTSC/PAL colors are different from a computer's VGA colors too.)

[Devil]

Sorry to contradict, but 8000 kbit/s is too high for many DVD players. Wherever possible, I advise a combined video + audio bitrate of 7000 kbit/s max.

For projects <~90 minutes, I recommend 6000 kbit/s constant bitrate for video and AC-3 (DD) 192 kbit/s 2.0 for audio. If you have audio at 5.1 surround sound, use 476 kbit/s, in which case you may have to reduce the video bitrate to 5700 kbit/s to compensate, if you are close to 90 minutes.

By the time that your project reaches approx. 120 min, you will need to reduce your video bitrate to about 4500 kbit/s. At constant bitrate, you will start seeing some artefacts if you have any fast-moving subjects or pans. This may be mitigated if you go to VBR with 4500 average, 3000 minimum and 6000 maximum. However, my experience is that this helps very little or not at all, because the fastest "movements" in most projects is rarely fast-moving subjects, but transitions. VBR is, IMHO, vastly overrated in its consumer/prosumer encoding implementation and rarely gives any real benefit. Hollywood uses hardware encoding with 20 or more passes, manually tweaked, so that the bitrate is accelerated where it is really needed. As a result, many blockbuster DVDs are encoded at 4000-5000 kbit/s average with most peaks at 6000, but with occasional maxima at 8000-8500 kbit/s where that is really needed (pressed discs play better in players than burnt ones, because they are optically optimised to give better contrast between the 0 and 1 bits).

Many beginners mistakenly think that faster is better. It is also possible to be more royalist than the king.

Whatever, always aim for a longer authored project to work out at between 4.0 and 4.1 Gb for burning a single-layer disk. It is a mistake to squeeze too much on it, even though the theoretical max is 4,38 Gb. This is because the outside mm of a DVD blank often has some poor finishing and/or handling contamination. If the project is shorter than 4.0 Gb with my recommended bitrates, this does not matter; do not try to fill the disc. Better to have a 2 Gb 45 minute project that plays well than push it to 4 Gb, when it won't play.

Finally, there are more players that accept DVD-R discs than DVD+R, although most modern ones are OK with both.