Tips for good AVI->DVD encoding on Toast 7?

[broaddd]

I've found that AVI->DVD encoding on Toast 7 looks much worse than using ffmpegx to do the encoding at roughly the same bitrate specs (eg. 3.5mbps).

Are there secrets to getting better results in Toast 7?

Cheers,
B

[terryj]

Frobozz should be along in a minute....

I'm also curious about this too...

[Frobozz]

Gee whiz, I don't know. I don't know what kind of video is in the AVI you had Toast 7 encode and I don't know much about ffmpegx.

What were the audio and video encoding settings you used in Toast? What is the resolution of the original video (i.e. 720 x 480 or something else)? What can you tell me about the AVI?

When you say they have roughly the same bitrate, does that result in roughly the same file size? Yes, I know it should but I'm just trying to get more information. I'm not even certain what "looks much worse" means. In what way is it worse? How does it look compared to the original?

[chikanakan]

To get the best quality out of Toast, you should use custom encoder settings and adjust the Motion Estimation to best. Turning Half-PEL on will also greatly increase the quality. This is important when using lower bitrate.

[broaddd]

I will post some comparison screens tonight. The resulting file sizes were similar.

The source in this case was an old Dr Who episode in NTSC which I was converting to PAL. The AVI was 640x480 - will check the bitrate.

In Toast, I used custom encoding: average 4mbps, top 5mbps, Best setting, half-PEL on. I also tried an average of 3.5mbps which looks much the same.

In ffmpegx, I used both the MPEG-2 ffmpeg and mpegenc settings (both of which end up looking similar), with the automatically recommended bitrate of 3.6mbps. Even without the ffmpegx high quality settings turned on, it looked much better than Toast as I hope my screens will demonstrate: brighter colours, less artifacting.

In other cases, I have used HDTV PAL rips of the recent Dr Who series, in which case Toast renders the colours ok (so is probably washing out the colours as part of the NTSC->PAL in the first scenario?) but the artifacting (particularly in high-motion areas) is still much worse than ffmpegx which has minimal obvious artifacting.

Toast does have a field setting that I leave on Automatic. Maybe this is part of the issue?

Bruce

PS. By artifacting, I mean chunky, pixelation, particularly in solid colours or dark areas.

[Frobozz]

The ability to convert NTSC to PAL is new in Toast 7 and I haven't yet experimented with it. So I don't have a sense about the quality. This is a good item to post on Roxio's Toast 7 forum because there are Roxio people who respond to those posts.

As for Toast encoding HD source to DVD I have done this with my NTSC system and it looked wonderful. But I was using Toast's default settings and not trying to compress to under 4 mbps. This involves both downsampling and high compression so I'm not entirely surprised there are quality issues. It might work best to do the downsampling as a separate step by using Toast's export to convert the HD source to DV and then have Toast encode the DV to MPEG as it authors the DVD.

[broaddd]

Thanks Frobozz. I know what you mean, but it doesn't really explain why ffmpegx produces much better results at doing the same conversion at the same bitrate.

[terryj]

Diffrences in the encoding engines handling [whatever video type is in] your .avi's, perhaps?
Doesn't Toast 7 use the MainConcept Engine,
and of course ffmepgx uses the mpeg2enc
engine...?

It's probably similar I guess to the differences between
Compressor (Quicktime based) and ffmpegx (mpeg2enc)...
Compressor does really well on mpeg-2, lousy on mpeg-1,
while ffmpegx does well on mpeg-1, and comparable on
mpeg-2... Some encoders handle certain sources better also.
I often notice that Compressor handles things that are
encoded using 3ivx and Quicktime codecs better, while
ffmpegx handles DIVX and WMV better than Compressor.


Just throwing that out there...I don't use Toast 7 at this time,
but have been lurking following this thread....