Preserving image quality from flash camcorder to dvd?

[rsud]

I have a mini-dv camcorder and a new flash drive based camcorder.

I have both apple and windows computers.

I have tried iLife '09 and then iLife '06 HD but am disappointed with the resulting dvd image quality when authoring my camcorder movies to dvd.

Plugging my mini-dv camcorder or my flash based camcorder directly to my TV and I see good quality image.

Using the iLife software the resulting DVD is quite poor in image quality comparison.
I had moved to apple thinking that the iLife suite would be easy to use and would produce good quality dvds.
Simple to use, yes... but pretty big loss in image quality and no settings to change it.

So, maybe I am going back to the windows world and am seeking advice on which DVD authoring package would preserve my camcorders recording quality when I create a dvd. I want/expect that there should be almost no discernible video image degradation when I put my movies onto DVD.

I only shoot 1 hour of video per dvd. I don't mind if the processing takes awhile.

Any help appreciated.

[jagabo]

DVD doesn't support high def. So any high def video will be downscaled to standard def for DVD.

[rsud]

DVD doesn't support high def. So any high def video will be downscaled to standard def for DVD.

Yes, I realize that and was not asking about HD.

What I want best possible quality Standard Def on my home created DVD.

There is no reason that a DVD made from a mini-dv SD camcorder or an SD flash camcorder should be any lower in image quality than the camcorder source.

Currently, when I hookup my SD camcorder to my TV I see good image quality.
After using iLife '09 or '06 HD to create a DVD when I watch that on my TV the image quality is quite reduced (looks like VHS).

I am looking for a DVD authoring package (for windows or mac) that will preserve the SD camcorder video/image quality to DVD.

[edDV]

Separate issues MiniDV and HD. Something sounds wrong if you are seeing VHS quality.

First for MiniDV, are you importing to iMovie over Firewire? Then using iDVD to create the DVD?

I'm not pleased with iDVD for flexibility but it should be giving more than VHS quality.

Keep in mind that MiniDV is all individual frames at 25 Mb/s. Encoding in iLife reduces bit rate to about 4-6 Mb/s by adding MPeg2 temporal compression. More flexible software allows up to 9+Mb/s. Still there is some loss going from DV to DVD MPeg2.

[jagabo]

Sorry, for some reason I thought your flash camcorder was HD.

[rsud]

Separate issues MiniDV and HD. Something sounds wrong if you are seeing VHS quality.

First for MiniDV, are you importing to iMovie over Firewire? Then using iDVD to create the DVD?

I'm not pleased with iDVD for flexibility but it should be giving more than VHS quality.

Keep in mind that MiniDV is all individual frames at 25 Mb/s. Encoding in iLife reduces bit rate to about 4-6 Mb/s by adding MPeg2 temporal compression. More flexible software allows up to 9+Mb/s. Still there is some loss going from DV to DVD MPeg2.

Yes, for iMovie 09 I am using firewire and turning off image stabilization and then use iDVD. Beyond a cursory pick of import size in iMovie, I picked full resolution for import (but am not recalling the exact verbiage in iLife since its been a bit since I last used it) there are no other settings.

I hit the Apple forums under iLife 09 and tried to find out what I can do about the bad DVD video quality and was guided to use iMovie '06 HD (becasue iMovie 09 is geared to youtube! Makes no sense, apple can't be this dumb, but got no further help). Picked up iLife 06 (on ebay) and it is better but still a noticable loss in image quality (went from bad VHS to very good VHS).

So maybe I am missing something in iLife but there aren't many settings to fool with.

So, I am now looking for other DVD authoring packages that will preserve my SD camcorder video quality to DVD. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[jagabo]

Maybe you could post short before and after samples. Others will be able to tell you if what you are seeing is normal or not, and maybe what went wrong.

[davidjon54]

I'm having the same problem. See earlier post from today. Is it possible that hd camcorders were made for blue ray and plugging into hd tvs and the software that allows it to be burnt to dvds degrades the video ALOT? I am very happy with the blue ray results.
PS.. I used to have pretty good luck with Adobe Elements back in the older standard video days.