Success 1st Time!! DV>EDIT>DVD (well sort of....)

[wizofaus]

Thanxs to the many great posts here I got my long awaited project onto DVD in my first go.

For a NOOB like me, having reviews and "how to's" allowed me to get straight into the programs I felt could do what I was seeking.

I have a bit of an issue with it tho that I wonder if you can help me....

When I play the finished product on a DVD player, I have severe pixelation??? blockiness where there is movement, or in a contrast area around eg a person. The movie also stop/starts in spots such as when I pan around.

Any suggestions on how to fix this would be much appreciated.

Here is what I did.......

I used EDITSTUDIO to add music, transitions, subtitles and mark in/out to edit over 90Gb of raw DV (captured via Firewire with WinDV) footage.

THis program was pretty easy to use in the timeline mode...


After I got the editing done, the program settings for building the Avi were


and


I then had an Mpg of about (correction) 4Gb which I used TMPGEnc 3.0 on as I understood that to use DVDLab I had to Mux/Demux?

Here are my settings

and

and


I then imported the finished MP2 to DVDLab. It was now back up to 4.1Gb and I made my menus etc.



The only drama I had was setting the Chapter points by learning the right format that DVDLab recognises from Editstudio.

Burnt the disc and it works.

Any ideas ???????

[SLICK RICK]

I used EDITSTUDIO to add music, transitions, subtitles and mark in/out to edit over 90Gb of raw DV (captured via Firewire with WinDV) footage.

I may be wrong here but are you saying you compressed 90GB of video to a DVDR?

SLICK RICK....

[wizofaus]

No......

I had 90Gb of footage that I cut up using the mark in/mark out feature.

Am trying to upload images of settings without success yet

[SLICK RICK]

Before you compressed the final video to burn to dvd what was the file size after editing?

SLICK RICK....

[DVD_Ripper]

Wow... sounds like a ton of work.... how many hours has gone into this initial production?

[wizofaus]

Before you compressed the final video to burn to dvd what was the file size after editing?

I didn't compress it (I Don't think I did anyway)... I just used the burn function in DVDLab tro output straight to a DVD once I had made my menus.

Wow... sounds like a ton of work.... how many hours has gone into this initial production?

hmmmmm lost count... it took 26hrs just for TMPGEnc to do it's stuff.

I have no idea why it is so blocky

[SLICK RICK]

Before you compressed the final video to burn to dvd what was the file size after editing?

I didn't compress it (I Don't think I did anyway)... I just used the burn function in DVDLab tro output straight to a DVD once I had made my menus.

Wow... sounds like a ton of work.... how many hours has gone into this initial production?

hmmmmm lost count... it took 26hrs just for TMPGEnc to do it's stuff.

I have no idea why it is so blocky

That stuff that TMPGEnc was doing was compressing. Do you know what the file size of the video was before compressing. The reason I ask is because the the pixelation and blockiness is probably due to some heavy compressing to get the file size small enough to burn to dvd.

SLICK RICK....

[wizofaus]

Hi Slick,

thanx for the reply.

The original file size was 33.4Gb
Here are my settings for the TMPGEnc output.


I noted in a few other threads that the bit rate can affect file size. Could this be the cause (ie too low) of the resolution problem? Would that mean I have to shorten my video?

I also saw in another thread about using TMPGEnc with a slide show maker that caused a similar effect (ie low res)

EDIT Had another go at compressing and got the message "there is no quoted number of Character-String '%.2f' "

Any suggestions on what this means?

[Dr. DOS]

hmmmmm lost count... it took 26hrs just for TMPGEnc to do it's stuff.

I have no idea why it is so blocky

Wow.... 26 hours.... You may want to try transfering / converting to MPEG via Mediaconcepts MPEG Encoder .... it save me a ton of time and the quality is superb.

DV ---> MPEG Conversion & Capture ---> Edit via fav program ---> Author / Burn.

[jimmalenko]

Firstly, congrats on getting this far - looks great !

I noticed that in TMPGEnc you used CBR 2123 in one of the screens, then you had VBR ave 3467 in another - I found that a bit hard to follow. For 2 hours 38 min I would have considered encoding to Half D1 (352 X 576) using VBR min 1500 ave 3467 and max 5500. The other thing that could be wrong is field order - it has been known to cause jerky ghosting-type effects on movement.

[wizofaus]

When I first created my AVI, I had a sync error with some audio, and some of my transitions were not quite right and I went back to fix up.

They were the settings that I posted.

Once i completed my re-edit and build of the AVI I went to re-encode with TMPGEnc, and noting some of the replies tried to alter some of the settings, as you can see in my post.

I have gotten stuck though as it won't run now due to the error message

"there is no quoted number of Character-String '%.2f' "

So now I cannot proceed...... am downloading mpegencoder at the moment........

[wizofaus]

Have re-encoded with mainconcept mpeg encoder. Really good program and is much faster than the previous effort.

It has not resolved the problem though of pixel/blockiness.

If I adjust the bitrate any higher than

min 1500
ave 3467
max 5500

it will not fit onto a DVD. I have the field encoding set for the bottom. Can anyone tell me if this has any effect if I change it to top? I seem to still have some sections that are jerking

I also had it set to single pass encoding? with the frame rate @ 25fps and no deinterlace.

Other than chopping the guts out of my production to shorten it, can anyone suggest a solution?

[jimmalenko]

Two and a half things for you to think about:

1. AFAIK uncompressed DV is bottom field first, but I could be wrong. Possibly make up two samples, each about 1 minute long using the Source Range function in TMPGEnc, and make sure it's footage that you know is experiencing these issues, and have 1 TFF and the other BFF.

2. You can easily assign more bitrate by leaving your min and ave at the same values but up your max. The ave will determine how much time you can fit on 1 DVD, so up your max to 6000 or 7000 and see if that makes a difference (Might be an idea to use the Source Range function and just encode 1 minute of footage that you know is suspect to the issues you describe). BTW I was assuming you were using 2-Pass VBR.

2.5. Upping the bitrate doesn't have to be a great concern - you can always up the average and the max 1000 or so and use DVDShrink or DVD2One to shrink down the output to fit after authoring.