PAL burn quality not as expected!

hotdog71 · Post by **hotdog71** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:27 am

Hi All,

I have been trialing VS11 Plus for about two weeks now and have come across a couple of issues that I need to try and find some answers too before I determine if I will buy the product and I hope to find it in here.

My issue is with burning PAL DVDs.

The burnt DVD play back was really very bad, choppy, and appeared to be some corruption in parts of chapters whare the screen goes partially blotchy green and red squares and not completing the chapter. Also the quality was very poor on the bits that did work

I had just burn an NTSC version of the same file a couple of days before and it turned out really good so I was a bit confused when this happened.

I have a Sony HDD DCR-SR80 camcorder (NTSC)
Steps:
1) I upload the files on the CC to my PC HD and editing them everything is ok.
2) Covert the files to MGEP2 Share> Create VF everythigs is ok.
3) Go to Share> Create Disc
4) Create and Edit menu
5) Set DVD to 8.5G
6) Set preferences
General <tab> to PAL with VCD player compliat ticked, Anti-flicker ticked, Max 30MB menus for se-top DVD+VR recorder
7) Set Advanced<tab> to NTSC/PAL safe color ticked @ 10%.
8 ) Disk burner> set recording format to DVD-Video.

Total project size is around 7.5G so it takes around 6 hrs to complete burn.

I did burn a smaller PAL version of another project succefully using trial version of MF6 which is the better product?

Sorry for the long post I am trying to get as much info in as possible to hopefully generate some ideas on things I can try to resolve this any comments would be welcome?

My profile has all the PC specs requested.

Thanks
Freddy

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:58 am

First problem here is the source file (NTSC) conversion to PAL. It is not that easy. First of all, NTSC has a smaller frame size and a different frame rate also. VS needs to resize the video from 720 x 480 to 720 x 576 and every second drop a number of frames from 29.97 fps to 25 fps for PAL.

All PAL DVD players I know off can play NTSC disks. The opposite is not always possible. I would leave the project as NTSC and distribute to PAL users as is.

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 8:19 am

As above but I wanted to add that we appreciate the long posts with lots of info. Makes it easier to offer advice.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 9:25 am

Apart from Heinz's advice, with which I agree completely, the other thing you have to maintain is the same Field Order throughout. In this case it would Upper Field First as hard disk camera use that. So apart from the glitches that would occur from seeking to change the format (the frame size and dropping frames to match the lower PAL frame rate), if you didn't use the same field order, you would also have jerky looking video and jagged edges to start with...

And to save wasting blank discs, you might want to think about setting the final 'burn' target to 'DVD folders' rather than a disc. That way, you can play back the folder on a software DVD player like PowerDVD or WinDVD, and see if things look right.

But getting back to the NTSC to PAL conversion, you need to be aware that consumer level programs of any kind, like Video Studio, simply cannot do it. The only program of which I am aware which makes a decent, but not perfect, job of it is Canopus ProCoder. But that is really a professional level program, with a price tag to match...

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 3:06 pm

Before I made the discovery that most PAL DVD players can play NTSC DVD's, I tried making some PAL versions of home movie DVD's to pass on to relatives in the UK. The results were OK, though you could see a drop in picture quality - but the source files were DV avi. I suspect the problems of converting from NTSC to PAL are exacerbated by hard drive camcorder mpeg format source files.

skier-hughes · Post by **skier-hughes** » Tue Oct 30, 2007 5:26 pm

It's not just frame size and rate it's frequency and chrominance/luminance that is different.

All new dvd players and tv's will play a pseudo ntsc signal known here as PAL 60, but older sets and players don't do this. My dvd player will but my tv won't!!

hotdog71 · Post by **hotdog71** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 8:26 am

Hi All,

Thanks for the info and feedback

I just thought it was odd since I managed to burn a 4G PAL (+- a few MB) version of a home video using MovieFactory 6 the quality was reduced (per stated comments) but it wasn't too bad. But I didn't see the same corruption or lost data issues with it.

As Ken commented I might have set the worng field and now I can't remember what I set it too.
So I will probably try your guy's advice and just burn in NTSC and see which family members DVD's will play it.

Thanks for the good feedback.

regards
freddy

Post by **lancecarr** » Wed Oct 31, 2007 9:26 am

Hi Hotdog,
Another thing you might want to take a look at is that you are burning a dual layer disc.
Although the technology is supposed to be there to do this on a computer burner it is not at the same reliability as single layer.
So, your possible points of collapse are:
The media itself +- R, R/W. may be unsuited to playback device.
The burn speed too fast/too slow. Generally burn one speed down from the highest rating.
The playback device can't handle the bitrate.
The playback device can't handle dual layer "burned" DVDs.