DVD Workshop 1.2 Compression Quality?

[davpen]

I just purchased DVDWS 1.2 after having tested the 1.0 demo. I had been impressed by the MPEG2 compression quality of 1.0 so I was quite surprised when my first test of 1.2 showed a quite dramatic drop in quality to the point of being totally unacceptable.

My source video is DV captured from a good quality tape through an ADVC100. The material itself is animation.

Using any compression settings 1.2 produced video that looked low res (blocky) with very noticeable aliasing on any diagonal edges. A short clip compressed with 3700VBR on 1.0 looked better than the same clip compressed with anything up to and beyond 6000VBR/CBR on 1.2.

Nothing else on my system had changed and uninstalling 1.2 and reinstalling 1.0 demo restores the good quality compression.

http://www.taswegian.com/davpen/comp.zip

This 400K zip file contains two very short MPEG2 files, 3700VBR compressed with 1.0 demo and 4500VBR for 1.2. With the compression biased in favor of 1.2 it should produce a better result but it doesn't.

I sent a query to ULEAD's technical support a few days ago but I have yet to get any response. I don't know how long they usually take.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this in the upgrade to 1.2?

Does anyone know of anything that might cause this?


Cheers,

David.

[Robert Simandl]

Yep, I sure have. Same thing. In fact, I now always make sure to check "do not convert compliant file" every time I make a disc. As for the reason, I'm clueless...?

[Lamont Cranston]

According to Ulead's What's New in V1.2:

"Enhanced MPEG.Now™ encoding - The latest release of the MPEG.Now™ codec makes both DV-to-MPEG capture and file transcoding faster than ever. Benchmark results with a Pentium 4 processor show up to a 59% improvement in capture speeds over the previous version for DV-to-MPEG direct capture."

The mpeg encoder upgrade may account for the quality change.

[Robert Simandl]

According to Ulead's What's New in V1.2:

"Enhanced MPEG.Now™ encoding - The latest release of the MPEG.Now™ codec makes both DV-to-MPEG capture and file transcoding faster than ever. Benchmark results with a Pentium 4 processor show up to a 59% improvement in capture speeds over the previous version for DV-to-MPEG direct capture."

The mpeg encoder upgrade may account for the quality change.

If that's the case, then they've unfortunately sacrificed quality for speed.

[ejai]

I found the quality of the 1.2 update to be better than 1.0. When I first attempted to use 1.0 to encode I didn't like the quality so much that I went back to using Tmpgenc.

I've burnt several DVD's using 1.2 and all look great especially on fast moving areas.

I'm not saying that you are wrong, but my opinion is that the quality has gotten better.

ej

[davpen]

Yep, I sure have. Same thing. In fact, I now always make sure to check "do not convert compliant file" every time I make a disc. As for the reason, I'm clueless...?

Well I am glad I am not the only to have this problem.

There are several possibilities that spring to mind. There could be something wrong with my system but this seems unlikely as 1.0 works fine. It could be that the performance improvements were obtained by changing settings in the encoder rather than code optimisation. I hope that's not the case. A third possibility is that they have changed the settings to better suit the type of video most people have. My video is animation which it may not favour now.

If the problem does involve changes in the compression settings then it highlights the problem of having no control over these settings. Not having to play with settings is nice when the defaults suit your video but leaves you out in the cold if they don't and you have no way of changing them.


David.

[techtrak]

Ulead support told me to try the NTI module rather than their own (select under 'Recorder' in the FINISH menu - perhaps that will improve the quality?

They did not however answer this newbie's main question: how to record to a CD ROM disk AND get it to play the finished version including menus and stills on any computer...

The CD burned with DVD WS 1.2 has a number of directories and some contain files, and I can even select some of these files and play them by indivudually opening them, but the entire disk will not autorun or do anything.

Any tips would be appreciated!

BTW, I exported the Premiere 6.1 timeline using TMPGENC which was quick and clean, and then imported the MPEG1 file into DVD WS for further treatment with menus etc.

Rgds,
Luis

[Robert Simandl]

Ulead support told me to try the NTI module rather than their own (select under 'Recorder' in the FINISH menu - perhaps that will improve the quality?

They did not however answer this newbie's main question: how to record to a CD ROM disk AND get it to play the finished version including menus and stills on any computer...

Hmmm, for my DVR-104 drive, there apparently isn't an NTI driver. There's only one choice for recorder: Ulead.

Sorry I've got no answer for you on the second question

[techtrak]

Bob, perhaps this applies only to recording a VCD on a CD in my Acer ReWriter...

On the other question: I've just about stopped kicking myself for my stupidity this morning, haven finally woken up to the fact that even though I've recorded a VCD, it needs to be played back on a DVD player or through an appropriate player such as PowerDVD!
I had blithely assumed that DVD WS would put the whole menu structure, clips, audio and stills on the CD and add the necessary player as well, so that the thing would play when you inserted it in a CD drive!

Talk about a conceptual block!

I tried the recorded CD in another computer with old PowerDVD software and it played as expected - except it was very jumpu and coarse if you went up in the screen size...

Rgds,
Luis