Poor DVD video quality, but not sure where I went wrong...

[dhwachs]

I have been trying to transfer some video to DVD, but am having some problems. I don't know if my problem is in my ripping, editing, rendering, or burning. I have gone through a lot of the articles here , but with the wealth of information listed, it is quite possible to have missed something.

My process:
I started with a DVD which I had burned from a VHS tape using a Philips DVD recorder. The quality of the video on that DVD is good.

I ripped the video from the DVD to an MPEG-2 file on my hard drive using Amigo DVD Ripper. The 1h52m video created a 2.2Gig MPEG file.

I edited the video using Nova Development's Video Explosion. I added about 2 minutes of music, a handful of scene transitions, and some text. Then I rendered the edited video to a new MPEG-2 file.

Once the rendered MPEG file is created, I am using Ulead Movie Factory 2 to burn the video to DVD.

Video Explosion allows for 3 different templates when rendering the video... NTSC Better, NTSC Medium, and NTSC Good.

Using the "Better" template created a file 7.9Gig, and using "Medium" created a 5.2Gig file. Movie Factory could not create a DVD from either of those files due to file size.

When I rendered the video using the "Good" template, the resulting video was only 1.9 Gig, but after burning the DVD, the quality was quite poor.

I should be able to fit 2 hours of good quality video onto a DVD. So I must be doing something wrong. Since the initial video file was only 2.2Gig, I don't understand whiy the edited version would more than triple in size.

Feel free to give any advice or simply point me in the direction of an existing article.

Thank you.

[willy_annand]

Several questions arise:

1. The initial MPG2 file, the one at 2.2Gig what is the resolution?

If it is not 720x480, possibly your video editing software is attempting to convert it.

2. Why rip to MPEG? Why not rip to a lossless format like Huffy?

You could then edit in VirtualDub and frame serve to TMPGEnc. Both VD and TMPGEnc are excellent and free. MPEG output from TMPGEnc is extremely flexible and amazing quality can be achieved.

Remember, every time you encode to MPEG, you lose quality.