Digital8 to DVD Quality Issue?

[robbieturner]

Hello, I'm a complete newbie to DVD authoring so any help is greatly appreciated. I have about 20 Digital8 tapes I'm converting to DVD and I've noticed that the quality is rather poor with significant artifacting and much lower contrast. I realize I'm not using professional software or equipment but I just want to make sure I can't get better quality using basic authoring.

I have a Sony Digital8 camera that I've connected to my PC using firewire. I'm using Adobe Premier Elements 3 (APE3) to capture video to AVI. I'm then burning to DVD using APE3. The resulting DVD as I mentioned isn't horrible but there's plenty of artifacts and it loses the deep blacks from the original AVI. I'm only burning one hour of DV footage to a DVD and I've set APE3 to use the best quality which ends up being about 3.2GB on the 4.7GB DVD.

When I watch the AVI files directly the quality is still there. There's a noticable difference in quality viewing the DVD on my PC as well as on our HDTV set. I realize that you'll get more artifacts watching on a higher resolution screen but when I watch the video directly from the Digital8 on the HDTV the quality is still better. I've read that the quality of the DVD will be lower due to compression but it should be relatively unnoticeable which it's not. I don't know what type of compression APE3 uses and I can't see a way to change quality. I'd prefer to stick with APE3 because it's the only program I know how to use and I've created menus in Photoshop and APE3 easily integrates them into the authoring. Everything's great except for the quality.

Any help or clarification is appreciated!

Thanks,

Rob
[/video]

[edDV]

I haven't used Elements in a while but I do have an uninstalled v4.

The black level shift seems unusual. You are using IEEE-1394 (Firewire) for capture?

What artifacts do you see?

Most Adobe products default to 6Mb/s average. You can increase this to 8Mb/s for better quality.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Just for kicks try transferring with WinDV and make a DVD with DVDFlick, with this method you can't edit the video but you can see if the problem is APE3.

[greymalkin]

I have never been impressed with premieres built in mpg encoder, it has always made my video look much softer/blurrier even when setting the highest bitrate. I would export to lossless or uncompressed and use a better mpeg encoder.

[robbieturner]

Firewire for capture although I'm using USB 2.0 from my external HDD. The artifiacts look like basic pixelization during motion and increased grain to the footage which I'm assuming is from compression. Where do you increase to 8MB/s?

I'll give DVDFlick a shot although I tried with an alternative encoder, Ulead, and the results appeared to be even poorer using the same AVI's.

I really appreciate everyones advice.

[lordsmurf]

You'll be hard-press to beat the quality of the MainConcept encoder. It won't happen with some freeware all-in-one thing like DVDFlick, either.

[robbieturner]

You are correct.... I tried DVDFlick and the quality was worse. The sharp edges on objects were even more pixelated.

This project is to archive all of the footage and it's not like I'm using for broadcast reason so I might just suck-up the existing quality. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't something I was doing wrong or overlooking.

[MOVIEGEEK]

There are many variables but I get great quality when converting DV to DVD(even with DVDFlick):
Are you using HDMI between your player and HDTV?
Does your player upconvert?
How old are the tapes?
Are the camcorder heads dirty?
Did you only put one hour of video on a SL DVD(two hours for DL) and set bitrate to max?

[poisondeathray]

How "shaky" is your footage? ie. tripod shot ? or epileptic seizure shot?

[robbieturner]

DVD to HDTV is component however I don't think that's the problem. When I connect the D8 camera directly using A/V cables the image is clean.

I don't believe my player upconvert's.

Tapes are about 6 years old.

Camcorder heads could be dirty but again, the quality from the camera to the TV is good.

I have only used one hour of footage per tape.

The footage is mostly handheld but not overly shaky.

[robbieturner]

Thanks again for everyone's help.

[edDV]

Thanks again for everyone's help.

Like I said, I don't currently have Elements installed but for what it's worth, when I encode a Premiere or Vegas project (Mainconcept MPeg2 encoder) bottom field first, 720x480i at 8 Mb/s average , the DVD player S-Video output looks near identical to the camcorder S-Video connected directly.

You must have a settings isssue.

[fvisagie]

@robbieturner,

Chances are your Sony Digital8 footage is YV12 colour space format bottom field first (BFF) interlaced material.

Inappropriately (and usually unnecessarily) converting the colour space can lead to loss of colour information, so look for colour space settings in your process and set them to either YV12, or to preserve the current format.

Processing and encoding interlaced material can be gotten wrong by either bad deinterlacing (which is usually also unnecessary), or by processing the fields in the wrong order. Wrong field order shows up as shuddering in high-motion scenes.

If you can't get APE3 to preserve or improve interlacing and/or to use the correct field order, see if you can get it to render to interlaced DV instead, and then use an external encoder like HcEnc, FFmpeg etc. to do the compression, specifying the correct field order if necessary.