Shaky movie when camera pans sideways

[Vulcan]

I make DVD out of DV. Whether I use CCE or TMPGEnc the movie is shaky on sideways camera pans (not up down pans). The result is the same wheter I use a 1CCD camera or a semipro 3CCD camera.

It does not seem to be a field order problem (not a combing effect just shaky as if the camera have problem catching up). The problem does not occur if the camera is still and the objects move (e.g. when shooting from a car) but it occurs when the camera moves sideways and irrespective if whether objects are non-moving or moving. The shakiness is not noticable when playing back the DV tape directly so my guess is that it has to do with the encoding or the conversion.

Is the shakiness something that I'll have to live with when encoding from DV to DVD? I use 2 - 4 passes VBR, average 7,500 and max 9,000 and I guess that the higher bitrates are allocated to the complex sideway pan parts. Since I have the same problem whether I use CCE or TMPGEnc I don't think it is encoder related. I have also tried different field order but the shakiness is still there (even more so on the movie as such when the field order is wrong) so I don't think it is a field order problem. I live in PAL country, the video is 25 fps and interlaced and I have not gotten the framerate wrong.

Anyone have any ideas? Could it be due to the camera been set to autofocus (maybe a stupid question but I have run out of ideas) or is just that simple that DV as such is much higher quality than the resulting mpeg even when recorded at DVD rates?

[googlioboy]

I think what you're looking at is the 'demuxed' portion of your raw MPEG2 video. When you get your when you convert your dv footage to an .avi file and then convert the .avi file to a dvd-compliant MPEG2 file, this happens normally. If you're using MYDVD or DVDit! for authoring your dvd on your computer, it will 'demux' the video portion of the MPEG2 ifle before writing it to disc. So, don't worry--you're just going through all the trepidations we all have.

[Vulcan]

Thanks for the reply but I'm afraid that this is not the case.

I'm talking about the end product, i.e. the authored DVD when played back on my stand-alone DVD-player. The disc is burned using HP DVD100i, RecordNow 3.5. The stand-alone is a Philips DVD711.

[Triffid]

Just a thought, but maybe your DVD player can't handle the 9 Megbit top limit you have set. And, it could be that it is only going that high (or how ever high it is actually going) on the scenes where you are panning.

You could try lowering the maximum to somthing else (start a lot lower to be certain) and see what happens.

I can't burn DVD's myself (no burner), so I don't really know how they behave at too high rates, but I know that with X(S)VCD's when you get above about 2600 kbits/sec on my DVD player it starts to behave badly.

Also I don't think your auto focus comment is stupid, because I have found that when my camera looses focus it becomes very difficult to encode the resulting video (another reason for the encoder to push up the bitrate too). So maybe..

Hope this was helpful

[mnmubin]

Same problem here.
All panning cause something like stoboscopic effect. It happen right after the video (Sony D8/ Sony 8 handicams) captured via firewire to PC. It's okay if we play directly on TV. All process - including the final product: (I mean VCD/ SVCD) also got that stroboscopic effect when played on TV.

I used to had a nice, fluid motion on panning sometimes ago using the same camera and the same apps, but with DC10plus card.

[Xesdeeni]

I've begun doing some DV to DVD conversions in anticipation of a DVD burner, but I haven't noticed the problem you note.

Is there any way you can make a short clip available for us to take a look?

Xesdeeni

[Jamester_uk]

Just started to get into outputting my DV onto my new Pioneer DVD-A03, and I get the same effect. At first I put it down to the encoding as well, but I'm not so sure now.

Most of the film the quality is superb, but there are a couple of panning shots that look awful. It's almost like a shadow following it, with a jerky motion. On the DV source it is perfectly smooth.

Encoding it using TMPGenc is fine (if slow) and I used the DVD PAL templace that I found on one of the guides here. It creates a nice MPEG file that seems to be pretty smooth as well. Doing the DVD conversion is also ok, and using the software player on my PC, the DVD-RW plays back fine.

On any standalone DVD player (tried 3) the motion is screwed. Viewing the bitrate during these sections it appears to be ok, hovering around 8 Mbit, and although it peaks to 10 occasionally, this does not coincide with the dodgy panning.

So, could it be a limitation of the fact I am using a DVD-RW to test? Will it maybe be ok when I put it on a DVD-R?

Is it just always going to be like this with MPEG and panning when you use a freeware encoder? I know MPEG, and DVD players can handle fast motion - look at the Matrix!

Any ideas?

[mnmubin]

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