DVD's looking worse than VHS

[asmoboba]

Hey,

Super newbie here....I've gotten an NEC 2500 burner and have burned a few DVD-R's with it so far and I'm really disappointed to notice that the DVD's I've burned to replace stuff I have on VHS look worse than the VHS copies.

For example, I downloaded a hockey game recently that looked great on the small windows media player sized screen on the computer, but once I encoded and burned it to DVD-R, you can see the "pixelation" or whatnot that my VHS extended play copy I have of the game doesn't have.

It just seems like anything that started out analog like tv shows or whatnot looks worse once its been converted to digital than it did beforehand.

On a side note, the things I've been burned are recognized beforehand as 352 X 480....should I then be burning them as that, or does bumping them up during the authoring process to 740 X 480 help at all?

Thanks for the help if any of this makes sense.

[FulciLives]

352x480 is a valid DVD resolution for the NTSC format. If your clip is that way to start then you should leave it that way.

Sounds like you are working with mostly downloaded videos. These tend to be highly compressed which causes a lack of quality i.e., compression errors.

Sometimes you can make use of filters to clean up the image but filters will only do so good and if you filter too much then you loose too much detail. There is a fine line when filtering between "cleaning up" the image and "destroying" the detail.

Also bitrate plays an important part. 352x480 is called Half D1 resolution and Half D1 resolution usually hits the MAX bitrate at around 4000kbps to 5000kbps so when using a lower bitrate compression artifacts MIGHT be noticeable especially on fast action scenes which of course are present almost ALL the time in a sporting event.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[asmoboba]

352x480 is a valid DVD resolution for the NTSC format. If your clip is that way to start then you should leave it that way.

Sounds like you are working with mostly downloaded videos. These tend to be highly compressed which causes a lack of quality i.e., compression errors.

Sometimes you can make use of filters to clean up the image but filters will only do so good and if you filter too much then you loose too much detail. There is a fine line when filtering between "cleaning up" the image and "destroying" the detail.

Also bitrate plays an important part. 352x480 is called Half D1 resolution and Half D1 resolution usually hits the MAX bitrate at around 4000kbps to 5000kbps so when using a lower bitrate compression artifacts MIGHT be noticeable especially on fast action scenes which of course are present almost ALL the time in a sporting event.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

This is good info, thanks. So there is really no way to avoid these problems except filtering may help a bit?

I basically purchased the burner because the idea of converting old VHS/downloaded video to DVD sounded good, but I'm realizing that as you've mentioned, the results don't necessarily look great.

[ZippyP.]

.... the things I've been burned are recognized beforehand as 352 X 480....should I then be burning them as that, or does bumping them up during the authoring process to 740 X 480 help at all?

Yes, it helps..it helps make them worse! Increasing the resolution will only make a video look bad, you can't create resolution when it's not there. You are not "authoring" if you are also changing the resolution, that's encoding.

What type is your source files? If they're mpegs then author (not re-encode) and burn as-is. Chances are you won't make them any better, even with filtering.

[ZippyP.]

I basically purchased the burner because the idea of converting old VHS/downloaded video to DVD sounded good, but I'm realizing that as you've mentioned, the results don't necessarily look great.

Done right, it should at least look as good as the source.

Good luck.

[asmoboba]

.... the things I've been burned are recognized beforehand as 352 X 480....should I then be burning them as that, or does bumping them up during the authoring process to 740 X 480 help at all?

Yes, it helps..it helps make them worse! Increasing the resolution will only make a video look bad, you can't create resolution when it's not there. You are not "authoring" if you are also changing the resolution, that's encoding.

What type is your source files? If they're mpegs then author (not re-encode) and burn as-is. Chances are you won't make them any better, even with filtering.

The files I've downloaded appear to be Xvid files...I then encode them into MPEG-2 with TMPGenc before authoring with DVD-Lab and burning with Nero.

Anything I should be doing differently? I'll leave them at 353X480 from now on...

[ZippyP.]

Try the internal TMPGEnc noise filter on the default settings. It will add alot to the encoding time so maybe just try a short clip and burn to an RW to test.