The Crisp Quality of DVDs... how?

[[*]_BonKerS_[*]]

You know when you watch a DVD and then watch the extra scenes? Well, there is a big quality difference between the DVD and the extra scenes. My question is why?! I am convinced that when they encode the actual movie they use cleaning filters or something along those lines. And when they encode the "other" material they just kind of encode it so it is watchable, but not as clean and whatnot.

What do they use to clean these footage up? I want to convert my mini-DV movies to DVD but I want to boost the quality (if possible) when I encode to DVD video...

...so what is the deal?

-bonks

[adam]

Yeah its obvious they don't take nearly as much effort encoding the extra's as they do the movie.

The main reason for the quality difference is the bitrate. Analyzing a few dvds on my hard drive, the extra's (deleted scenes, trailers, etc..) had an avg bitrate of around 3 to 3.5mbits. The movies avgeraged closer to 6mbits. They obviously encode the movie at as high a bitrate is needed and simply use whatever space is left to squeeze in the extra's.

Also if your talking about ntsc dvds then the extras are almost always telecined while the movie is encoded in ntscfilm and telecined during playback. This effectively increases the bitrate of the movie by %20. Some of the extra's I can understand why they are telecined like trailers and those "Making of" or "Behind the Scenes" things because those usually get broadcast on television. As for things like deleted scenes, I guess they just telecine them for sake of consistency, i really don't know. Maybe these are stored as segment items and must be telecined? I'm not so familar with dvd authoring. Unfortunately since your using dv you cannot record in ntscfilm, unless your camcorder is really high end.

Movies do undergo some filtering before being encoded. I know they always use some noise reduction so you should look into doing this as well. Though its effects are somewhat artificial, you should play around with some sharpening filters. They have their drawbacks but they can really give the impression of a sharper picture.

[Guiboche]

Yes, those extra scenes are encoded at a lower bit-rate (usually), but a lot of the times, those extra scene come from a different source. A lot of the time, deleted scenes and such are taken from work prints of the movie, which are horrible quality to begin with (they don't need perfect quality for their work prints).

Also, depending on the availability of certain special features, they come from tape sources. A lot of older movies press kits and on-set documentaries (etc) are only available on old betacam tapes (or a variety of other tape formats). These tape formats are encoded to DVD, and of course are lower quality then the actual movie itself.

Anyhow, hope this was of interest to you.

Guiboche