Burned Dvd a little choppy?

[kerouacknew]

Hi,
Just purchased a burner recently to use with my mac computer. Have burned CD's for years but this is my first stab at DVD's. I downloaded some none copyright show ; ) by way of a torrent and burned it to DVD yesterday but when i watch it i noticed a slight choppiness to it. Not really bad but enough to bother me. Just looking for suggestions on why this happened and how i could make better dvds in the future. here is all the specs in can think of regarding this. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Emac 800mghz
pioneer dvr1200 connected with firewire enclosure
Toast 8 burned as a DVD video
file was an AVI which opened in quicktime
burned at 2 X i believe
burned 6, 1/2 hour episodes on one DVD(verbatim)

[Case]

If your AVI is 23.976 frames per second, then Toast 6/7/8 will make a 29.97 fps DVD from that by repeating every 4th frame. The repeat frames are only shown for 1/30th of a second, so most people won't notice that unless there is a fast pan or zoom.

01 02 03 04 04 05 06 07 08 08 09 10 11 12 12 13 14 15 16 16 17 18 19 20 20 21 22 23 24 24
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

I'm not sure if this is improved in Toast 9, but there is a better way of encoding 23.976 material to a 29.97 fps standard, which Toast did not offer: applying a "3:2 pulldown" instruction to the video. This will leave the video at 23.976 fps, with an instruction to blend fields (half a frame) on playback. This results in much smoother playback, as just about any commercial NTSC movie DVD uses this technique.

[terryj]

You left out a few important details:

1. How much ram in the emac?

2. How much available FREE HD space on the emac?

3. Anything else going on while authoring the DVD in Toast 8?
(surfing the internet, etc)

4. Did the file play, from start to finish, without choppiness, in Quicktime?

5. What type of DVD Player was the finalized DVD played on?
Was it played back on the eMac using DVD Player?
Or was it played in the living room/bedroom on a store bought player?

6. Lastly, what type of Verbatim discs? 8x, 16x rated?
Purchased from where? Best Buy, Sams Club, etc?

[kerouacknew]

Case thanks for the post. That could be the problem as the stutter is just slight.. How do i apply a 3:2 pull down? I'm using an Apple.

terry j thank u for posting also. Here is the information u required:
1GB ram
35Gb available on one partition and over 100Gb on the other.
Did not use the computer while burning and authoring.
A little choppiness playing on quicktime though not as pronounced as with the dvd player.
DVD player is a older Sony model which also plays SACDs.
Not exactly sure about the verbatim disc as it was one i had lying around here for awhile. i just purchased some new ones from staples though which are 16X.

I read the other post on this page with a similar problem but all the software recommended is Windows.
Thanks for the help

[Herve]

How do i apply a 3:2 pull down?

I suppose that softs add it directly during encoding (but not Toast).
So encode your file, if the encoder does not apply directly the pulldown bit in the encoding file, then use a third soft to add it: PulldownX, ffmpegX (tab "tools") or mine (Menu item"tools->Modify"). No need to buy a soft, these processes are free with the 3 softs.

here is a link to show you differencies between pulldoxn and just duplicates frames (take a look to the animated gif, you don't need to read my text )
http://movieconverter.online.fr/intl/interlaced_field.php#pub

PS: you have Verbatim DVD-R (good discs), don't forget to burn slowy (burn *4 or *1 for very old dvdplayer compatibility, never use the speed "best")

bye

[kerouacknew]

Herve thanks for the info.
I downloaded movie converter and followed your instructions but am not sure it worked. i went to tools and modify. It said it modified it but i was not able to find the new file. Does it create a new file or just change the existing one? Also, it only took about 30 seconds and the AVi is 2.6 GB.

[Case]

Most (all?) Mac tools that can apply a 3:2 pulldown, require to operate on an .m2v file, the video-only MPEG-2 stream.
So if you have a muxed .mpg file (video + audio), then you have to demux it into its elementary streams first (a video-only file and an audio-only file). Then you can apply the pulldown to the .m2v file. After that, the new .m2v file with pulldown may be muxed back with the audio into an .mpg file, which then can be authored to DVD.
This may sound like a lot of work, but these processes are fast (minutes) compared to the encoding from AVI to MPEG-2 for DVD (hours).
An encoder like ffmpegX's mpeg2enc has a 'Set 3:2' checkbox to automate the process during encoding, so that the user won't have do the pulldown as a separate step, when going from AVI to DVD.

[Herve]

i was not able to find the new file. Does it create a new file or just change the existing one? Also, it only took about 30 seconds and the AVi is 2.6 GB.

hmmm...
30 second is too short to modify bits inside mpeg2 (data must be read and write again, no encoding but a data modification)
PS: You ask how to add pulldown to your resulting mpeg2: you could select the pulldown checkbox in MovieConverter ONLY if your m2v file is encoded as ntsc-film (aka 23,98 fps). The resulting files ("***-pull.mpg") is where you ask for, same folder if you choosed this option, another one if you manually select another

but, if your m2v/mpeg cames from Toast, Case said it to you: your .avi is still encoded to 29,97fps without pulldown, with frames duplication.
Nothing to add to this file, toast did a bad job (idvd does the same), you must reencode your avi correcty (with another encoding software)

bye