dvd compression question

[Zodiak]

I am an animator and I need to get some of my work onto a DVD quickly. Up till now, I have been rendering my films from After Effects using the DV codec and then onto a miniDV cam. However, I have found myself in a situation where I need to present said film on DVD (film festival.) I am willing to purchase a DVD burner drive for my computer (P4 2.27Ghz, 512 RAM) but as my original files are super huge after editing, all I have of the original film is the already compressed DV codec .Mov files (720x480 30fps). To be precise, the Radius SoftDV NTSC compressor.

My question is, can I use these DV .mov files and re-render them using the MPG2 compression DVD player use without a loss of quality? Or will it be like photocopying a photocopy and will look horrible. If there is (as the finished product will be projected 20x larger) I may not be able to do this, as the original uncompressed avi files would take much too long to recompose, and will need to come up with another way.

Thank you if you could help.

Thank you for any help you can offer.

[daamon]

Hi Zodiak,

Any time you go from one format to another, where there's encoding involved, you will lose some (even if it's negligible / imperctible) quality.

As for how to do it, look in the "How To... Convert" section on the left and look up "MOV to... DVD or MPG" in the "Format Conversion" drop-down box.

How about this for a quick, easy and different approach to the problem:

Put the .mov files on a suitable laptop and hook that up to the projector?

Good luck...

[HenrikSolberg]

Or, you could use TMPEGenc with the Quicktime plugin to convert your .mov files to mpeg2 files. But you will get a little quality loss!

[Baldrick]

converting/encoding is not dvd authoring. moving you.