Burning HD to normal DVD + other questions

[Gaelstrom]

Hello, I am doing a small freelance project doing a video that needs to go to DVD and (potentially) HD DVD. I'm very inexperienced with this hardware aspect of it, so I'm hitting some snags. My video is 1920x1080, my client wasn't sure he wanted HD but since the source material I'm using is compliant for being that huge I decided to go the safe route and err on the side of caution, which turned out to be a good thing.

I found a couple programs (Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus Ulead Video Studio 11 Plus I believe) that claim to be able to make a normal DVD-R into an HD DVD with up to 42 minutes of footage, and I want to know if anyone was able to do this effectively to play on either HD, regular DVD, or both?

Some other general questions I'd appreciate answered:
1) Is 720x480 the maximum DVD resolution except with the potentials the before mentioned programs offer,
2) My 1080i rendered movie strobes a bit and seems to jump frames during faster pans and zooms while playing back on my comp. I'm on a P4 3ghz, 1 gig ram, Radeon 9800 Pro video card and my theory is that my computer simply can't handle it, but I would like to check and make sure (on a side note, the footage involves a detailed canvas texture and it strobes, is my processor related or is this a separate problem?)
3) Is there a special encoding method I should pay attention to? I render the video with Quicktime Animation compression and then run it through Sorenson Squeeze to turn it into MPEG-2, and it appears to work well. If anyone knows of a more effective work flow than this to prep for DVD, I'd appreciate it.
4) Is there a relatively inexpensive program that anyone could recommend that will allow me to assemble good quality DVD menus with some variety (and being able to animate menus if possible)? The menu creation in Roxio seems seriously lacking (which I kind of expected).

I sincerely appreciate any information anyone can give me.

[edDV]

Hello, I am doing a small freelance project doing a video that needs to go to DVD and (potentially) HD DVD. I'm very inexperienced with this hardware aspect of it, so I'm hitting some snags. My video is 1920x1080, my client wasn't sure he wanted HD but since the source material I'm using is compliant for being that huge I decided to go the safe route and err on the side of caution, which turned out to be a good thing.

I found a couple programs (Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus Ulead Video Studio 11 Plus I believe) that claim to be able to make a normal DVD-R into an HD DVD with up to 42 minutes of footage, and I want to know if anyone was able to do this effectively to play on either HD, regular DVD, or both?

That would be a DVD-9 (dual layer) disc encoded for HD DVD. It would only play on an HD DVD player.
Use the search engine to find detailed procedures.

Some other general questions I'd appreciate answered:
1) Is 720x480 the maximum DVD resolution except with the potentials the before mentioned programs offer,

Yes. the 720x480 pixels are non-square. When played to a square pixel display, 720x480 gets stretched to 854x480 for 16:9 aspect and squeezed to 640x480 for 4:3 aspect. This is all set in the DVD standard.

2) My 1080i rendered movie strobes a bit and seems to jump frames during faster pans and zooms while playing back on my comp. I'm on a P4 3ghz, 1 gig ram, Radeon 9800 Pro video card and my theory is that my computer simply can't handle it, but I would like to check and make sure (on a side note, the footage involves a detailed canvas texture and it strobes, is my processor related or is this a separate problem?)

Is this rendered video or camcorder video? Sharp edges and textures will cause round off errors (aliasing) without proper prefiltering. Make a DVD and see how the DVD player handles it playing to a TV.

3) Is there a special encoding method I should pay attention to? I render the video with Quicktime Animation compression and then run it through Sorenson Squeeze to turn it into MPEG-2, and it appears to work well. If anyone knows of a more effective work flow than this to prep for DVD, I'd appreciate it.

Nothing to add.

4) Is there a relatively inexpensive program that anyone could recommend that will allow me to assemble good quality DVD menus with some variety (and being able to animate menus if possible)? The menu creation in Roxio seems seriously lacking (which I kind of expected).

Ulead Movie Factory. ULead DVD Workshop, DVD lab Pro ... many more
https://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/authoring-dvd

[Gaelstrom]

Thanks very much for the information.

When you say 'When played to a square pixel display, 720x480 gets stretched to 854x480 for 16:9 aspect and squeezed to 640x480 for 4:3 aspect.' would you please expand a bit on what pixel displays I should be looking at (specifically for normal DVD and 1080i)? For 1080i I found that square pixels were what I should have (not sure if this is right), yet for others, I was uncertain.

As for the camcorder or rendered question, the source footage is JPEGs, so no actual video is involved except for the final created render, if that is what you were asking. The strobing and skipping only happen with the large 1280x720 and 1920x1080 renders, and get worse the larger they are, hence my computer power theory.

A small addition: when I attempt to render the video at that DVD resolution, considering it's 16:9 aspect ratio, it constrains to 720x405, and that is a very weird number. I plan to set the aspect ratio to 4:3 for a second version, but what resolution can I do for this 16:9 version (if anything) to cause it to appear widescreen on normal DVDs?

Again, thanks very much.

[edDV]

Thanks very much for the information.

When you say 'When played to a square pixel display, 720x480 gets stretched to 854x480 for 16:9 aspect and squeezed to 640x480 for 4:3 aspect.' would you please expand a bit on what pixel displays I should be looking at (specifically for normal DVD and 1080i)? For 1080i I found that square pixels were what I should have (not sure if this is right), yet for others, I was uncertain.

A computer monitor is an example of a square pixel display. All standard Vesa computer resolutions use square pixels for 4:3 (e.g. 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, etc.) and wide (e.g. 854x480, 1366x768, 1680x1050, 1920x1200, etc,).

It is in the wide resolutions where computer monitors tend to use 16:10 aspect ratios where video transmission is defined as square pixel 16:9 (854x480, 1024x576, 1280x720 and 1920x1080).

In general, video storage is done with non-square pixels (e.g. 352x240, 352x288, 720x480, 720x576, 1440x1080).

Video display can be square pixel (e.g. 640x480, 768x576, 1024x576, 1280x720, 1920x1080) or non-square pixel (e.g. 1024x768w, 1280x768w, 1440x1080w).

So in most cases, video storage and display are scaled with non-square pixels. Think of video pixels as elastic through storage and display.

As for the camcorder or rendered question, the source footage is JPEGs, so no actual video is involved except for the final created render, if that is what you were asking. The strobing and skipping only happen with the large 1280x720 and 1920x1080 renders, and get worse the larger they are, hence my computer power theory.

A small addition: when I attempt to render the video at that DVD resolution, considering it's 16:9 aspect ratio, it constrains to 720x405, and that is a very weird number. I plan to set the aspect ratio to 4:3 for a second version, but what resolution can I do for this 16:9 version (if anything) to cause it to appear widescreen on normal DVDs?

Again, thanks very much.

Stills and animations usually start with square pixels and must be H or V scaled to DVD (720x480/576) or TV transmission (704x480/576). These SD resolutions are used for both 4:3 and 16:9. A header flag identifies aspect ratio.

Common 16:9 high definition transmission standards may be square 1280x720 or 1920x1080 but storage is often scaled to 960x720 or 1440x1080.

As you know video quality suffers greatly when upscaled vertically and to a less extent when upscaled horizontally. Generally, H and V downscale does not degrade quality when displayed at the lower resolution. For this reason it is a good idea to render in square pixels at the highest vertical resolution you intend for distribution or higher so that all conversions are done by downscale. Any downscale for video needs low pass filtering to prevent aliasing.

All that is nice in theory but often economically prohibitive so each application subgroup has developed tricks and workarounds to optimize. The computer animation industry has been constrained by non-realtime rendering cost so use a combination of target rendering resolutions and video filtering to get to all the needed distribution resolutions. The computer game, TV broadcast and movie CGI subgroups compromise in different ways.

Others can get more specific but my general cheat for stills to video is to render 1920x1080 or higher if Ken Burns style pan/zooms are anticipated. Then I import these high resolution source stills into Vegas or Premiere and let the programs apply low pass filters and H/V scaling to the project resolution.

[Gaelstrom]

I'm very appreciative of all the information. This is more than I'd hoped for. I must admit that since this is pretty much my first time thinking about all of this for DVD purposes, all the various numbers for stretched and square pixels are confusing me a bit. I'm also slightly confused by what you mean by 'standard' and 'storage' resolutions. The information as I understand it stands as this: If I am going for a 4:3 TV DVD version, my resolution should be 720x480, based on your information, this should be rendered in non-square pixels. After Effects offers multiple pixel resolutions, but I assume the correct one in this instance is D1/DV NTSC (0.9). As for the HD version, 16:9 with Square pixels at 1920x1080 seems to follow your information.

If I were to take the 1920x1080 version and set it to 4:3 in composition settings, it would be 1440x1080 (square pixels) like you said, I believe. Now if I were to render a 720x480 version off of that, that would remain as square pixels and if I understand what you're saying that would be incorrect and appear stretched somehow. Would you be so kind as to explain what I can do with the 1920x1080 version to prep it for TV resolution correctly?

Also, I have access to Premiere. If it's not too much trouble, could you elaborate on what you mean by the low pass filters you mentioned?