Video Typically Degrades During Authoring????

[christopheramos]

Hello,

I have some TV episodes in .mpeg-2 format. They are about 500 MB each, and they look good when I play them on my PC.

I compiled the episodes and burned them onto to DVD. I used DVD Lab Pro 2.0 and had plenty of room to put 8 episodes (at 500 MB) and menus, on a 4.7GB disc.

But when I played the resulting DVD, the episodes don't look nearly as good. I don't understand, because I didn't compress the files or anything. At 500 MB they were the right size to burn them and not change them.

Does this always occur when authoring??

Thanks!

[jagabo]

But when I played the resulting DVD, the episodes don't look nearly as good. I don't understand, because I didn't compress the files or anything. At 500 MB they were the right size to burn them and not change them.

Where they DVD compliant resolutions and bitrates? What is the running time of each episode?

[bits]

What you see on your computer and what you see on your TV is usually different.

If you viewed the videos on your computer in a window that is smaller than full screen and then view the same video on a 27" SD TV you will see that the video looks considerably worse when viewed on the TV.

500MB in mpeg2 for a TV show, even a 30 min show is a pretty small file size and means that a low bitrate was used. Does not sound like high quality to begin with.

[edDV]

500MB in mpeg2 for a TV show, even a 30 min show is a pretty small file size and means that a low bitrate was used. Does not sound like high quality to begin with.

christopheramos,

Assuming half hour shows with commercials removed (22min), 8x 500MB means ~2800 Mb/s which should look ok at 352x480 but crappy at 720x480.

How did you encode and what settings did you use to author?

[guns1inger]

DLP won't hurt the video, however edDV is right about the resolution. I also assume these were converted probably from Xvid avis, which would have looked OK on your PC, but would have been very flawed on a TV. Combine these two effects, and you get low quality output.

[christopheramos]

Actually, the vids are 30 minute episodes with commercials removed. About 22 minutes each. They were recorded to a standalone DVD recorder straight from the broadcast. So no capturing or anything. So they looked good when watching them on TV to start with.

I burned them to DVD, then put them on my PC to author.

They are PAL format. 352x576 at 25fps and 4:3 ratio.

They looked good when viewed on the TV screen to begin with (as they were recorded directly from it). They also looked good on my PC.

But it wasn't until after authoring that they looked bad.

[guns1inger]

What did you burn them with ?

[redwudz]

You said they are PAL format, and I assume you have converted them to NTSC format. That can be a major problem. How did you do the PAL>NTSC conversion? I see you mention DVD Lab Pro 2.0.

I have never seen a authoring program degrade a video file. It normally just creates the DVD format and should not modify the original MPEG file.

This seems more a problem with a bad framerate conversion and maybe some re-encoding of the file if it was not DVD compliant. Especially if it was not NTSC DVD compliant and it was converted to that format .