DV to DVD What's the best way

[Excelsior123]

I am using my New TRV22 Sony Camcorder as a pass
through device to capture my VCR and 8MM Tapes.

I am using Movie Factory for the DV Capture. The
Capture looks Great! The files (*.AVI) is obviously
going to be huge, 7GB for about 30 Minutes.

So here is the 2 part question.

1) I don't have a DVD Recorder as of yet. I wil be
buying within a few months. What can I do with these
"DV" quality files in the mean time? Should I use TMPG
to convert to MPEG2? Then use these files when I get a
DVD Recorder?

1a) I tried this idea, and I have to say I am NOT
impressed. It fact the MPEG2 Conversion looks
terrible.
There must be an advantage to converting from DV to
VCD or DVD format?

2) I have found that when I use Movie Factory and do a
direct capture to DVD or VCD format using the pass
through technique OR using my Video Capture Board
the result is about the same and is pretty good. (It
is obviously doing software compression on the fly).

So What gives? Shouldn't my Conversion from DV be of
much higher quality? Shouldn't using TMPG compression
give me a much higher quality?

I don't see it! and at this time I see NO advantage of
using the Camcorder pass through.

Ideas? Am I doing something wrong here?

So my basic question is...How do I create the best
quality video output for VCD or DVD? Is the DV Pass
through techique of any advantage?

[EricB]

Excelsior123

Well the quick answer is, you must be doing something wrong! Using TMPGEnc to produce a DVD compatible mpeg from DV should look great. I think you probably need to supply a little more info to get a good answer (what version of Ulead, what settings, which version of TMPGENc, template settings) and elaborate on what looks terrible.
Maybe you have field orders reversed or something like that.

The VideoStudio direct conversion to DVD is decent but not even in the same ballpark as TMPGenc.

[bugster]

One thing to remember is that DV is interlaced, so you should encode to interlaced for DVD or use a good de-interlace filter if encoding to VCD (mpeg-1 does not support interlacing). Also remember that interlaced material does not look good on a PC monitor unless you use a playback tool that will do a good job of de-interlacing for display. Power DVD is pretty good for this.