Hi,
I burned my first DVD and the results were pretty good, I thought. I hoped someone would give some feedback or suggestions.

This was a copy of a TiVO movie, an hour and a half, captured through a Digital camcorder into Pinnacle Studio. I did some crude editing (joined two tapes and cut the excess off) and then made an MPEG in Pinnacle twice. First time I used their DVD defaults. The ending MPEG was much smaller than they guessed, so I tried again using custom. This time I chose the maximum data rate of 9000 and the adio kbts of 384. This was also smaller than anticipated and less than 4 gig. So I made a menu in Video factory and burned it.

It looked pretty good - the colors are a little washed out compared to the television version, but I heard here that they would be. Is there any way to improve that? Also, are the faded colors the same with any captured video, or is it just characteristic of camcorder capture?

I used a DVD-r from esbuy - their brand. Most of the movie looked fine (I didn't see it all) but there was one pixeled segment. I went back and viewed the MPEG and the pixeled blocks weren't there. Was this most likely from the DVD quality or the burner software or what?

I guess this is PCM audio because it's from camcorder. Is there a real benefit in somehow separating the sound and converting it to a different format? It sounds like an awful lot of hassle. How much space can actually be saved?

What about rendering with TMPGenc? I tried making a couple MPEGs, but have not burned a DVD with them yet. If I did the same movie with better settings in TMPGenc, would I be able to see a visible difference in quality? I tried the automatic settings on the first one and then the 2 pass vbr (which took over 8 hours!) using settings I saw on this board. The second (VBR) file was too big, I think, because Movie Factory wouldn't see all of it. Plus TMPGenc warned me that it was going to be over 4070 and suggested I reduce it (I didn't).

I'm confused about some of the settings in TMPGenc. I've read the help file, but it doesn't address everything (like the cbr selection on the first screen or the expert settings on the second screen). I had to guess at a lot of settings. What is the best way to judge and compare the different results?

Thanks for any input!

Deb