Help with degraded video quality

laiels · Post by **laiels** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 12:41 am

HI all. Came here looking for some help. I'm a complete newbie to all this so please bear with me. I want to put some videos onto a dvd. About 2 1/2 hours of AVI files. Anyways, when I went to the "Finish" Stage where you burn your dvd's, I sett the Disk Template setting to "Standard Quality". Rather than Burning directly to DVD, I recorded a DVD folder instead, and then used a DVD copy program (X Platinum) to copy to a DVD. I've been told, the compression is better this way (As the DVD file was bigger than a standard 4.7 gig DVD). ANyways, the video quality didn't come out to good (As compared to the source AVI's). I gets quite pixelated in spots, and can get kind of jumpy, especailly in scenes where there's large panning camera work. Does anyone have any tips on how to go about fixing this. Using worshop 2. Installed the 2.231 patches, though not sure if it was succesfully installed cuz I'm not sure where to check this. Thanks.

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 2:25 am

2 1/2 hours is a bit much for a DVD with good quality. You have to use very high compression to fit this, resulting in low quality. Having said that, there is no reason why a 2 1/2 hour video, starting from a good quality DV AVI file, should not give you reasonable quality when burned to DVD.

What where your project settings, system spec's etc?

laiels · Post by **laiels** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 6:37 am

Well, I didn't touch any project settings, so everything is at the default. THe only thing I changed was I set the Disk template setting to "Standard quality"
As far as computer specs? 3.2 gig p4 processor, 1 gig ram. Was this the info you were looking for?

Devil · Post by **Devil** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 7:05 am

OK, I think I see what may have happened. You encoded your video, producing a file of >4.3 Gb. You then used a ripper to reduce the size to <4.3 Gb, which would entail re-encoding. MPEG-2 does not take kindly to re-encoding as it is a lossy codec.

I suggest you go back to your WS2 project and adjust the settings, fine tuning them to aim for a ~4.1 Gb end result. Instead of "Standard quality", go to Customise. The first thing is to set the audio to AC-3 192 kbit/s then the video to a constant bit rate to what will give the required file size. As you have a long file, you could optionally go back to variable bitrate, setting the max value to 1.1 - 1.2 x the constant value, but it is not likely you will see much improvement, in my experience.

Then burn the DVD directly in WS2.

Let us know how you get on. But be warned that 2½ hours is never going to produce superb quality on a 4.3 Gb disc. If your burner will accept 8.5 Gb DL discs, you should be able to obtain a much better quality. Oh! and, no matter what you do, make sure you have the settings at Lower field first, throughout all your processing.

laiels · Post by **laiels** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 8:34 am

Thanks. I'll try your tips. I just wish it didn't take 3 hours each time to see the result. Will that fix the jumpiness, that I have (especially in scenes with large camera panning)? I was reading in some other thread and I believe that people were saying that this may have been a problem with the 2.231 patch and they were suggesting to just deinstall and go back to version 2. Is this true? or is there another way of getting around this. Again, thanks for the help.

jlietz · Post by **jlietz** » Fri Jul 08, 2005 7:19 pm

Regarding the jumpiness, are watching the video on your PC or on a TV through a DVD player? Sometimes a file will play back differently on the PC vs the TV. In other words, it may not be jumpy on the TV.

laiels · Post by **laiels** » Fri Jul 08, 2005 7:51 pm

It's jumpy on both