DV Camcorder to DVD. I can't get a good picture

[johnjk]

I've tried Ulead and the picture looked awful. I don't know exactly how to explain it, but it's sort of fuzzy. I have since tried CCE and TMPG. The picture looks alot sharper with these, but the motion is very jerky. I've read quite a bit here. I've made sure I uncheck upper frame first in CCE. I've tried several different settings. They all look pretty much the same. I've been using DVIO to capture with, TMPG and CCE to encode, IFO Edit to create the DVD files and NERO to burn them. Is there something I'm missing here? I'm fairly new to this, so I would really appreciate some help. Thanks in advance.

[paulb]

John,

I have tried for two years to perfect DV to DVD for high-motion marching band footage. I have finally found the answer. After trying Procoder, CCE with every option imagineable, I went back to TMPGENC for conversion and use a custom "Q-Matrix".

My TMPGENC settings are Highest Quality, VBR-2 pass Max 8000 avg 7000, GOP=12 I=1, P=5, B=2, MB1 Interlaced Q-Matrix, Soften Block Noise 35. You can find a link to the MB1 matrix by searching the forum.

40 minutes of footage takes about 4 hours to encode but the quality is near perfect. I've tried every piece of advice on this board with tweaks and the custom matrix by far was the best.

Good Luck.

[johnjk]

Thanks Paul. I'll give that a try as soon as I get time.

[tomclary]

I've made a few discoveries. If the captured DV video is file type 1 and the MS DV Codec that is part of DirectX 8.1 is used, the video is de-interlaced in the Codec before being sent to the encoding software. At least with CCE. The Ulead applications all seem to capture as Type 1. Microsoft has corrected the DV Codec in DirectX 9 to not deinterlace the video.

The other thing I have found with CCE, is that the output video is always specified Top Frame First. I found to get the best results I had to run an application (pulldown.exe or changer.exe) to specify bottom frame first. It made a big difference. The other thing I did in CCE was to not do any filtering, the video looked sharper that way.