HD to DVD Quality

[i008580]

Greetings, I haven't found existing thread that helps... Any thoughts on this are appreciated!

Pinnacle Studio Ult 11.1, source material is mostly HD from MTS, MP4, some 320 MPG material and JPGs. Rendered as MPEG-2 HD 1080i, looks great straight out of windows media player through a 1080 projector onto 96"screen. Looks great on LCD monitor as well.

Same project rendered as MPEG-2 DVD COMPATIBLE (720) is horrendous. Viewed straight out of windows media player on a 24" LCD, it looks very bad. Burned to DVD-R and played on a set top DVD player onto a 50"LCD TV, looks very bad.

I know it's a big drop from 1080 to 720, but is something else going on? Looks much worse than a commercial DVD played on the same equipment. Am I bumping up against limitations in Studio? Hardware? Or is there something I don't know about handling HD source material that I want to produce onto a DVD?

Thanks!
Kevin
HPE-180t 8x i7 950 @ 3.07gh 8gb RAM
GeForce GT 220 1gb
Pinnacle Studio Ult 11.1.2.5231
HP

[yoda313]

First things first - if by 720 you mean 1280x720 that is not dvd compatible. If you mean 720x480/576 then yes that is dvd compatible.

Second you do realize that regardless of what techniques you use standard defintion dvd from a high def source will not look the same as the high def source?

Third - what bitrate did you use? Did you use a dual layer disc? How much time are your trying to squeeze on to the disc? The more you try to squeeze on to a disc the less bitrate you can use and the lower the quality will be.

You need to mention what specs you outputted the video to.

To make it look better you can only use more and more bitrate to the max allowed - but that will lessen the amount of video you can put on a disc. (max is about 10mb or so including the audio)

Also you can use ac3 audio instead of pcm-wav to save bitrate for video.

[i008580]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Yes, 720x480 is what I am rendering to.

Totally understand that rendering to DVD Compatible is not going to look like the original HD material. I am just trying to get my original HD material to acceptable DVD Compatible. I admit I'm not experienced enough to know whether it is possible to get closer to commercial DVD quality with my specs, and if not, some advice on what to change.

Bit rate was 6M/sec.

Single layer 4.7GB DVD.

"You need to mention what specs you outputted the video to." Not sure if I just answered that, but if not, can you elaborate?



Thanks for the explanation on bit rate - I will start bumping it up to see what happens. If you have any other ideas, please let me know!!

Regs,
Kevin

[manono]

Bit rate was 6M/sec.

That tells us almost nothing. Is that VBR encoding and 6M/s is the average. Or is that the max. bitrate? Or are you using CBR encoding? You didn't mention how long the video is, although we could figure it out if you also told us the kind of audio (and its bitrate, if applicable), and if you filled the DVDR at your 6M/s bitrate.

Tell us the kind of material and its sourcel. I take it you created the video yourself? Is it of a man reading the news, or did you use a handheld camera moving all around and jumpy so you could achieve that 'cinema verite' realism? Progressive or interlaced? Interlaced, I presume. Did you downscale it from 1080i to 480i properly? Details, man, details. Small samples of both the source and the poor results would also be helpful.

[i008580]

I think you might think that I know more about what I'm doing than I do. I am grateful for your help, and if I'm not coming out with the expected info, it's because I don't know any better. I'm no pro yet, but I'm tryin' to keep up!

Video is about 45 minutes long.

I did nothing to downscale the material. I simply slapped the MTS files from the camcorder into a Studio project, edited and rendered, first to their preset HD 1080i default settings, which I liked, and then later the same project source to their preset DVD Compatible settings, which uses VBR, Progressive, 6M/sec. It's being rendered at 29.97 frames/sec.

It is mostly street action (kids on a school trip), handheld Cannon HD handheld camcorder, with some MP4 video from a Flip camera and some downloaded web content as well. Video is admittedly jumpy in parts.

Here is what Pinnacle tells me about the audio:
Compression: MP2
Channels: Stereo
Sample rate: 48kHz
Data rate
224 kb/sec

I will scrape out a short version... not sure what the forum will let me upload in terms of size...

Thanks again!!

[i008580]

Oops forgot - it filled the DVD+R to about 75%. So there is some room.

[manono]

I will scrape out a short version... not sure what the forum will let me upload in terms of size...

Up to 30MB this site allows. Better might be to upload to MediaFire or Sendspace. We only need 10 seconds or so of both the source and the DVD output, short sections with steady movement. Does this camera shoot interlaced video? If so, about the worst thing you could do would be to encode it as progressive.

I can almost guess what the problem is, though. You shot without a tripod, the video is jumpy as hell, and there's not enough bitrate allowed under the DVD standard to render it in anything approaching decent quality.

[yoda313]

and there's not enough bitrate allowed under the DVD standard to render it in anything approaching decent quality.

Of course an alternative for the poster is to create an avchd. Assuming an actual dvd is not required and the user has a bluray player capable of avchd - most do including ps3 - then avhcd is probably ideal.

I'm not sure if that version of pinnacle has avchd output or not. The poster could output to formal bluray specs. Then you could use multiavchd to create a avchd to preserve the high def in a "bluray lite" mode. That would probably produce the best outcome without having a bluray burner.

But this will only work with bluray players that support avchd and computers that are strong enough to playback high def video smoothly - usually dual core and higher with a decent hd video card.

Also these days bluray burners themselves have dropped quite a bit. Bluray recordable discs are still quite expensive but if you want to maintain full original quality without compressing at all that is the only way to do it.

OR the other approach is to simply do file output and use a media player like the wdtv media player or one of its competitors. Do the video edit and simply output a m2ts file or similar and playback the file on a harddrive with the media player. That is probably the most cost effective way to maintain high def if you don't want to go the avchd route - or buy a bluray burner and buy expensive bdr's.