Poor DVD quality?

[blairtechnique]

Hi,

I have recently purchased a new H.P computer that came with Sonic MyDvd installed. The operating system is XP media Center Edition. I thought that this would be designed for the function of video editing and that is why I bought the system. The DVD burner that came with the computer is a DVD +/- RW lightscape Double layer 16x drive (Whatever that means).

I wanted to convert my old Hi8 home movies to DVD. Because the camera is analog, I used a usb 2.0 connected to a ADStech DVDXpress capture device. Wanting the best quality, I used the Svideo outlet to connect my Sony camcorder to the DVD Xpress.

After spending hours trying to figure out how to use the Sonic MyDVD program, I was finally able to burn a DVD. I was very disappointed in the final product though. When I played it on my DVD player and TV it is very pixelated and rough and fuzzy looking. When viewed with the camera to the TV however the picture quality is very good.

My question is:

Has this happened to anyone else?
Is The capture quality different between using USB/firewire?
Are DVDRW drives different, some being better than others?

If someone has some input I would appreciate any help.

Thank you

[redwudz]

DVDRW drives will copy what you give them. You may have compatibility issues or problems with jumpy video (Extreme case) but quality should be the same with most any burner. That's not likely a problem area.

If you start with a good quality video file, you should be able to encode it to a good quality DVD. It's all in the settings. USB from a DV camcorder instead of FireWire is usually low quality, but that's not what you are doing. No matter. How's the quality of the video on the computer you DL'd from the camera before encoding? Good quality there is a necessity to have a good quality encode.

Most failures in quality occur in the encoder settings, not necessarily because of the encoder used. Most any MPEG encoder can put out a good product if you set it up right.

Using all-in-one converters and letting them do all the adjustments will often result in inferior quality. Some of them have good default settings, some don't.


First, check the quality in from your source.

Second, check how it looks on the computer hard drive.

Third, make up a representative clip of your average type of video, maybe ten minutes long.
Run this through your encoder and check the result. Try this with different encoder settings. Learn your encoder settings and tweak them till you get what you want. It's usually a balance between the size of the finished video and the quality you want. You should easily be able to get an hour of video on a DVD with good quality. More if you fine tune the encoder.

If your encoding programs don't give you what you want, try others. Most of use have learned that using individual programs for capturing, editing, encoding and authoring give us the best control and best quality. But there is a learning curve.

We have plenty of programs available in the 'Tools' section and also many guides to the left in 'CONVERT' and AUTHOR'.

And welcome to our forums.

[blairtechnique]

Thanks for the reply,

I checked the quality of my source film on my HD, with WMP, and found it to be very "grainy". The video itself is very clear in the camera however. So, I am begining to think that the problem lies in the conversion process of analog to digital video.

As I mentiond befor, I am using ADSXpress and it's bundled "CapWiz" capture program. During the set up of this program I was asked which format to use, DVD or VCD. I chose DVD MPEG-2. I assume that the encoding process is set to produce a DVD compliant file. Am I wrong in my assumption?

Thank you for your input.

[edDV]

Thanks for the reply,

I checked the quality of my source film on my HD, with WMP, and found it to be very "grainy". The video itself is very clear in the camera however. So, I am begining to think that the problem lies in the conversion process of analog to digital video.

As I mentiond befor, I am using ADSXpress and it's bundled "CapWiz" capture program. During the set up of this program I was asked which format to use, DVD or VCD. I chose DVD MPEG-2. I assume that the encoding process is set to produce a DVD compliant file. Am I wrong in my assumption?

Thank you for your input.

Your problem relates directly to the "ADSXpress and it's bundled CapWiz capture program". I haven't used it but I'd guess there is no hardware encoding. It is cutting quality so that it can apply realtime software MPeg2 encoding.

To get the most from this software, first verify that you are capturing over a USB2 port, not USB 1.1. USB 1.1 would limit you to CIF (352x240).

Also look for quality settings in the capture program. you should be using 720x480 for Hi8 and the highest bitrate your CPU can churn out without loosing frames.

Hi8 camcorder material is the most difficult to encode with quality because like all camcorder video, it is shakey and noisy unless you always used a tripod and bright lighting. MPeg2 compression relies on repetitive picture areas over frames (i.e. little motion) to get good quality compression. If the video is always moving, there is little opportuniy for motion compression, so the MPeg2 encoder increases inframe compression lowering quality further.

The better solution is to use a capture system that encodes to MPeg2 in hardware. This eliminates the CPU as the quaity limiter but is still a realtime process. A variation on this process is to use a standalone DVD recorder that realtime hardware encodes and records the result to DVDR or an internal hard drive. It is important to use the highest quality setting (usually one hour per DVD layer or ~ 9500Mb/s).

Next best strategy is to use a quality PCI capture card and capture the Hi8 without compression to the hard drive. This will stress most PC's so most people doing this use a lossless Huffyuv CPU compression that effectively lowers the bitrate to the hard disk to managable rates for a typical high end PC. The capture file will be on the order of 30-40 GB per hour. Then software filters and encoders can work on the capture file non-realtime for highest quality MPeg2 results.