Best way to encode to DVD?

[PlayingKarrde]

Hi guys and gals,

I did the search and came up with nowt, so have to ask this question as it's bugging me a great deal now.

How can I get optimum quality from my DVDs when encoding on a PC? I've tried sooooo many times but every time I encode my video looks crap. I can get it so your typical video is fine, but any flat graphics, specifically reds, come out absolutely terrible. The file is only 10 seconds long, but no matter what bitrate I set, be it CBR or 2-pass VBR, or what encoder I use, I can't get a good looking red out of it. Can someone please help me??

I've tried encoding directly from AE, transcoding within EncoreDVD, TMPGEnc, ProCoder... I'm at a loss as none produce quality that I know is possible. Compare it to retail DVDs and you've got a huge difference. Let me elaborate with some screendiggery:

[guns1inger]

I would suggest that your red is not video legal, and is being adjusted to compensate. NTSC especially has limits on some colour ranges, reds in particular.

[jagabo]

Also note that colors are encoded with half the resolution (both horizontally and vertically) of the luminance (greyscale image) so you won't get perfectly sharp red letters.

You have black level or gamma problems too.

[PlayingKarrde]

Thanks for the replies guys. When you say my red isn't video legal, how would I make it so? Is there somewhere I can check the legal colours?

I'm not super worried about the black/gamma right now, just the logo. Is this the case with retail DVDs too? I don't seem to be seeing the reds bleed so much when looking at, say, Superman DVD?

[jagabo]

Other colors will turn out better. Original (top) and samples with different colors (via HSV adjustment) converted with TMPGEnc:

[PlayingKarrde]

Unfortunately I cannot change the colour of the logo as it is the brand. If there was a compliant red though I might be able to pull that off.

[jagabo]

One thing you can do to clarify the logo is to make sure that the top and bottom edges of each stroke fall on even pixel boundaries and make sure the edges are sharp to start with. For example, here are some 16:16 pixel red blocks on a black background after encoding to MPEG. Some blocks are aligned on even pixel boundaries and some are not (4x nearest neighbor enlargement for show):



As you can see the unaligned blocks are very fuzzy. Your rounded corners will continue to be fuzzy but it shouldn't be as noticable.

This will require that your logo be exactly the right size and right alignment. If you're encoding interlace you'll have to make the vertical alignment on 4 pixel boundaries, not 2.

You could also make the logo larger so that the fuzz around the edges is a smaller percentage of the stroke width.