Ligos Plug-in and low-light footage

[NinaJane]

I am trying to make a DVD-R of the footage I shot of a high school graduation. (Sony DCR-TRV520 camera, firewire, Windows XP, Premiere 6.2, Ligos 2.0 Premiere Plug-In, Pioneer DVR-104 burner, Ulead DVD Movie Factory.)

The ceremony was in a church and the ambient light was VERY low. The DV footage is grainy, but acceptably so given the conditions.

I set Ligos at VBR 8000 kbps. When I make a DVD-compliant file and burn a test to DVD-RW, the resulting image is pixillated in some areas and generally fuzzy.

Are there any tweaks to the Ligos settings that can clear up some of this problem?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions,

Nina

[Xesdeeni]

I'd suggest you use AVISynth to export from Premiere and frameserve to TMPEGEnc. You'll be much happier with the quality of the result.

Xesdeeni

[spmc]

NinaJane,
You can try one of the "filters" that Ligos 2 offers, but that may not help much. If I were you, I would try to improve the picture in Premiere before you encode it with Ligos. Premiere has several "image filters" that can be applied to video clips in order to improve their apperance. You can adjust "brightness", "contrast", "color", "saturation", etc.
Take some clips in Premiere, apply different filters to each, render them, and then just encode those few clips as a test to see if there is any improvement. Once you find a filter effect that gives the results you are looking for, apply it to the whole project. It will be time consuming but it will probably be the best way to go.
Encoding with Ligos or any encoder will only take a picture and try to reproduce it in a MPEG file format. It cannot make an image better than the original.
Just my two cents.

[NinaJane]

Thanks for the tip about TMPGEnc.

I've been reluctant to do this, because when I used TMPGEnc's DVD Wizard and tried to burn it with DVDIt!, DVDIt! wouldn't recognize the file created by TMPGEnc. It said I needed a different decoder.

Do you think Ulead DVD Movie Factory will be more accepting?

Or can you think how I could set up TMPGEnc differently to get it to work with DVDIt!?

Thanks again,

Nina