DVD Picture Quality

[ifly2940r]

I just purchased the Memorex dual format DVD recorder and am having some picture quality issues. My main goal for buying a DVD recorder was to edit and make high quality backups of my Sony DV tapes. I have been using Pinnacle 7 for about 2 years now and have been very happy with the quality of the home movies that I have rendered and put back on digital tape. I was assuming that I would get the same perfect digital clear and sharp results if I burnt my home movies onto DVD. Could someone please tell me if I was correct with my assumption?
I have tried everything I know how and I keep getting the same results. (The DVD’s I burn are just not as good as the original DV Tapes.)
I don’t think the problem could be in the hardware I’m using because when I render a movie back to tape it’s perfect. Is this a software issue?
The Memorex burner came with Roxio easy CD and DVD Creator and that’s what I’ve been experimenting with. Pinnacle 7 does not burn DVD’s and I would like to get this issue worked out before I spend more money and upgrade to 8 and have the same quality issues. All my attempts at this have been with small 10 min clips and under “options” in the DVD builder it is set to Low Compression for optimized quality. If this is a software issue would Pinnacle 8 be a solution.
Thanks for the help!!

[bugster]

I don't know which encoder is being used but it is probably not one of the best (All in one products rarely are). Encoding DV to DVD can produce very high quality results, though matching the original quality is difficult. One of the main problems with encoding home video is camera shake due to the use of hand held cameras. This simply eats up an encoders bitrate, leaving less for the real movement. Different mpeg encoders will handle this in different ways so I suggest you experiment with them. TmpGenc is very good and has a 14 day free trial. CCE Basic is also very good but not in the slightest user friendly. MainConcept and Procoder are also pretty good, not sure about trial versions though. Any of these encoders, set up correctly, should produce mpegs close to the original DV. Then you can author and burn.

With home video, keep the bitrate high. VBR with 6k average at least. No more than 75-90 mins per disk.

[zzyzzx]

I would think that using TMPEGnc to encode DVD quality home movies should yield something as good as or better than the original in picture quality (with proper filters, etc).