My first post

[Thordell]

Hi
This is my first post, The only one I know on here is Terfyn as I have spoken with him on another forum about Panasonic Camera’s and it was him that introduced me to VSP by singing the praises of what a good editor it is, so here I am, I have X7 Ultimate and very pleased with it.

I am not new to Video Editing I started in 1979, the early ish days of VHS with editing machines of the day, then started computer editing in 1994 with Ulead and Adobe Premiere 4.

Having used Video8 and Mini DV for years and making successful DVD’s I seem to have met my match when I entered into the world of Video HD, I just cannot seem to get a satisfactory DVD, I’m not very happy with the quality at all, The camera is set to record in 1080/50i and I set the Project to edit in 1920-1080 then go into share and make a DVD, I may add that before going on to Corel VideoStudio my HD footage was edited in Serif MoviePlus and I had the same poor results with that, I could produce a much clearer DVD with my old Mini DV tapes than I can from the HD footage.

MP4 footage played on Facebook looks fine it’s just the DVD’s I’m not happy with, so how do you guys do it or is HD footage always bad in DVD’s

Sorry about the long post.

Alan

[lata]

Hi Alan
And welcome to the forums

You are best first creating a HD video file of your project.
Using the properties of your video file is probably the best option.
Then start a new project using the new hd video in the timeline to convert to DVD Mpeg2
This new file Mpeg2 can be used to burn a disc. First play the video to check quality.

Before you render go to preferences (F6) Edit tab and set Resample Quality to Best
That should improve the render quality.

You are of course best to burn a bluray disc, downscaling the HD to SD certainly does reduce the quality, and yes I agree DV-AVI produces very good DVD video.
Maybe better than HD to SD conversion.

There is an option to Burn a Hybrid disc, using the AVCHD file to burn to a Standard DVD
You will get approx. 30 minutes per disc, ish depending on your data rate.
That at least will retain the HD quality.

But again if you are using a HD camcorder then you should upgrade your system to burn those bluray discs

Whats the model of your Camera?

[Thordell]

Thank you for your reply Trevor,

I will have a play around with what you suggest to see if I can improve things a bit, I don't do so many DVD's as I used to so it's not so desperate but it would be nice to be able to produce a clear one if needed.

I have two Panasonic Cameras, an HDC-SD700 and an HC-V750 but of course I still have my Sony DV cameras which I am tempted to go back to sometimes.

I'm happy with the Panasonics in every way apart from the DVD issue

Alan

[Ken Berry]

As Trevor has already suggested, a major problem in using DVDs for high definition video is just that they were not made for high definition work! Going from high def AVCHD mpeg-4 at 1920 x 1080 at 18,000 kbps or more down to standard definition DVD-compatible mpeg-2 at 720 x 576/480 at 8000 kbps is already going to result in a significant quality deterioration.

This was why Blu-Ray discs were invented: to allow burning of high def video in a high def format with no -- or negligible -- quality loss. And the price of Blu-Ray burners and players has dropped enormously in recent years.

I have a Blu-Ray burner and two Blu-Ray players, but in truth I don't even use these much anymore. Instead, I edit my high def AVCHD or HDV and output it in AVCHD (or Blu-Ray compatible mpeg-2), then simply copy it to an external USB hard disk or stick drive. These can then be plugged directly into many modern HDTVs for direct playing, or at least plugged into a Blu-Ray player connected to the HDTV via HDMI cable. The quality of playback this way is wonderful!

[Thordell]

Thank you for that Ken, these are certainly areas to look into, you've both given me food for thought.

Alan

[Terfyn]

Hi again Alan
And welcome to the Forum. Sorry I missed your first post yesterday but you are in the best hands possible.

My own route through X8 is by ticking "Show message when inserting first video clip into Timeline" in Preferences and replying Yes when the question screen is presented. This will keep your clips to the same format as the camera created i.e. 1080/50p in my case (from the HC-V750)
I then "Share" to a file using AVC/H.264 and copy that file to a SD card. I have a Panasonic Blu-Ray player (now reasonably priced) with a SD card slot which accepts files in the AVCHD form and the replayed video is excellent quality.

The trick is (if possible) to keep the format the same up to the Share stage. Occasionally this can produce juddering with my rather slow computer during a preview but, when the video is rendered in Share, all this disappears. I always render in the correct format to a file first and check the final video before burning to disk or loading on a SD card. This does mean two rendering processes to give me two files, one for a DVD and the other for AVCHD output to my BR player.
I also find that VS will accept a mix of AVCHD and MP4 (as in the Slow Motion on the 750) without getting upset and, occasionally, I have mixed the two forms in the same video.

[lata]

Hi Alan
We have all gone through the mill in upgrading our cameras from Standard to High Definition, Indeed I still have the Pana Mini DV camera- ultimately you will need that Bluray Player and a Bluray Burner, but like Ken says you may opt to save the video to USB stick to play on the tv, no need for discs.

And we have all experienced the poor quality when downscaling Avchd to DVD.
The (F6) Resample Option to Best certainly improved things for me.

You could also try using a Video Converter.
Format factory is a free converter that seems to do a good job
Take care to install only Format Factory as the installer tries to install other bits, simply say no to everything other than Format Factory.

Terfyn mentions using the Show Messages, that is a must…….
It will set the project properties correctly for your video files.

If one of my files is the first clip then I use Share – Same as first Clip as the option to render the project.

[Terfyn]

I would agree with the Blu-Ray player as you can burn a standard DVD with the AVCHD file and it will play - but only on a BR player. I have never bothered with a BR burner although it will happily work with VideoStudio, I have found that AVCHD on a Blu-Ray player to be very acceptable. Depends how far you want to go.

As I suggested the newer BR players come with SD ports and USB ports as well as Ethernet connections so, if like me, your telly is not a recent purchase, this is a way of getting the higher quality pictures through HDMI into the TV.

[Thordell]

Thank you Gents, and nice to hear from you again Terfyn.

There's a lot of helpful advice on here, I have a Blu ray burner but do not have a blu ray player on the TV as I have never had the need before.

What started all this was my old DV cameras looked better on DVD's than the footage from the HD cameras, it all came home to me when a member of our dog club asked me for a DVD of one of the dog shows I filmed I was just not happy with the look of it although she was as pleased as punch with it.

I suppose I shall eventually end up buying a Blu ray player probably one with an SD card slot as Terfyn said he had, I may also download that Format Factory that Trevor mentioned and have a play around with that.

Alan

[Thordell]

Well, I had a good day yesterday making trial DVD’s, as I had got a free day I thought I would spend the day methodically logging different settings and viewing the results of each DVD, eventually I arrived at what I thought was the best result.

Edit the footage with the project set to 1920-1080 50i, go into Share and click on Computer then click Mpeg 2, make an Mpeg 2 clip with settings of 720-576 50i, to make the DVD go into Share click on Disc then Click DVD and make the setting DVD 720-576 import your Mpeg 2 clip and burn your DVD

There was another setting in the DVD settings and that was marked Mpeg 2, I tried a disc in that, it gave more room on the disc but it’s quality was marginally down but I do mean marginally, could be useful if you needed that little bit more room.

Hope this may be of use to other people, it been a thing bugging me for some time.

Alan

[Ken Berry]

There was another setting in the DVD settings and that was marked Mpeg 2, I tried a disc in that, it gave more room on the disc but it’s quality was marginally down but I do mean marginally, could be useful if you needed that little bit more room.

That second setting reflects the fact that bitrate reflects quality; but equally, a higher bitrate means you can burn less to a disc. The first setting uses a higher bitrate of 8000 kbps, which gives the best quality for a DVD. That is the maximum bitrate many stand-alone DVD players can actually play. As a rule of thumb, though, an 8000 kbps bitrate will only allow you to burn a project about an hour long to a single layer DVD (4.3 GB) using LPCM audio with the mpeg-2 video. You will be able to burn about 10 minutes more video to the DVD if you use the more compressed (i.e. smaller) Dolby audio option.

The second setting you found uses a lower bitrate (usually around 6000 kbps), and as you found the quality is marginally down on the first setting, but still good. A 6000 kbps bitrate allows you to burn 90 minutes of video to a single layer disc with LPCM audio or 10 minutes or so more using Dolby.

At the bottom end of the scale, if you manually adjust the bitrate down to 4000 kbps, you will be able to burn 2 hours to disc, but the quality will be no better than VHS tape. Going below 4000 kbps isn't really worth thinking about!