How to get quality and capacity?

[terrypin]

At present I'm using Movie Maker 2 for creation. Input is mainly JPG photos, plus a few AVI clips from various sources. Pans/zooms/fades/titles/music/etc allow these to become acceptable movies for family TV viewing. My output from MM is always to AVI, which I then 'author' in either ConvertXtoDVD or Nero Express (or TMPG Enc when I learn how to use it) to make a DVD.

In all the guides, I read statements to the effect that a 4.7 GB DVD can contain 'up to 135 mins of high quality video and sound'.

Yet it seems that using these methods I'm restricted to significantly less than that. The project I've just finished, a holiday movie of 19 mins, at 4:3 aspect ratio, PAL, takes over 1 GB. By extrapolation, I'd get under 1.5 hours max. Previous DVDs gave similar estimates.

The quality of my output at present is only just acceptable (a bit blurry in truth), so I certainly wouldn't want anything less. I'll obviously post in one of the MM specialised forums too, but I'm wondering if I can get some advice here please. How could I get get 2.5 hours of high quality onto a DVD please?

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Terry, West Sussex, UK

[guns1inger]

Step one - use a bitrate calculator. This will allow you to determine how much space at what running time = what bitrate.

Step two - get a better editor. WMM is OK as a toy, but like Photostory, it's out put is fuzzy, no matter how high you ask the quality to be

Step three - get a good quality encoder. Nero's mpeg2 encoder is not very good. ConvertXtoDVD's is a little better, but both of these are really designed to preserve low relatively low quality downloaded files as they are converted to DVD. Look at HCenc (free) ProCoder Express, Tmpgenc Plus or CCE Basic (all payware)

[terrypin]

Thanks, appreciate the fast reply. I'll follow up your suggestions. But I'm not clear how those alternatives would remove need for MM2? Looking at the description for HC, I read "HC is a free MPEG2 Encoder. Input can be a d2v project or input using Avisynth." Leaving aside that I've no idea what d2v or Avisynth are (I don't use them), how would I use HC instead of MM2? Do you mean I should use it as an extra step, after MM?

I do have VirtualDub, BTW, if that's relevant.

How would you and others here make your DVDs please, given the sort of input I've described?

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Terry, West Sussex, UK

[Cornucopia]

WMM can do the basic stuff that you're needing it to do, and DOESN'T make it blurry if you're outputting to DV-AVI.

Check and see if your DV-AVI file is blurry. It shouldn't be.
It should be HUGE! (25mbps adds up quick).

No need to worry, it won't be DV-AVI anymore when put on a DVD, it'll be encoded to MPEG.

Steps:

1. Make edits.
2. Export DV-AVI from WMM. (Type1) (check quality)
3. Convert Type1 to Type2 in DVDate (check quality again, if OK, delete the Type1 version).
4. Encode to MPEG2 video in TMPEGenc (of the 3 you mentioned, it is by FAR the best). Audio should also be compressed (AC3 or MP2), but which depends on whether you have an AC3 encoding app (if not, use TMPEGenc to compress to MP2).
5. Using the VH BR calc, you should have a VBR stream with AVG bitrate of 3869 and peak of 9603 for video (minimum should probably be 300) and audio would be 192kbps. This will give you 2.5 hours (Vid Filesize=4151MB, Aud Filesize=210MB). Quality SHOULD be ok, considering most of your stuff is Still pictures, with a little KenBurns-style transitions FX. Take a good TMPEGEnc template for DVD and modify it to fit those numbers. You may want to have it be encoded as progressive video (try a short segment and see if it looks better).
6. Author and Burn.
7. Delete the DV-AVI file(s), and then the MPEG files when you'r sure all's well.

**You need to have a large enough hard drive for the intermediate DV files (>50GB each)

Scott

[terrypin]

Excellent, thanks Scott. Much to study there. Some of it beyond my current skill level, but I'll get stuck in and see how far I get.

I reckon my first step is to learn how to use TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6. I found it a bit daunting when I installed it months ago, set it aside, and since used ConvertXtoDVD. I rather like that no-brainer prog! But everyone seems to speak highly of TDA. (Is that the right abbreviation, BTW? I assume 'TMPGEnc' can also mean TMPGEnc Express 3.0, which I also have?)

Re the blurriness, I'm not sure. I just watched the DVD on TV and some of my really crisp JPG originals (resized 50% from 2816x2112 fresh from my Nixus 60 to 1408x1056 for more sensible handling) were definitely on the blurry side. And I didn't pour my first dry white until afterwards. Others seemed pretty OK though, which doesn't make sense! The DVD was made by feeding the 4GB AVI I got from MM2 to ConvertXtoDVD. (That's a prog that definitely needs an abbreviation!). This time, my second burn of essentially the same AVI, I took the 'high quality/slower' option in ConvertXtoDVD, instead of the default 'Medium'. Even though I couldn't see how it could improve the result, given that it was starting from a rather poor AVI. I played the AVI in PowerDVD before opening it in ConvertXtoDVD, and that's where I made that judgement. No worse by the time it got to my flat TV screen - but no better, of course!

I was hoping to show you a comparison - JPG v AVI - but I got weird results when I tried using PowerDVD's capture tool and pasting it into IrfanView. It was grossly pixellated. What's that about? And of course the files are all so huge that uploading even a fragment might be difficult. So you'll just have to take my word for the blurriness for the time being! I need to try a test comparison with some other movie editing program to get any further with this issue.

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Terry, West Sussex, UK

[edDV]

If I'm reading you right you want maximum compression to a $0.20 (~15 pence) DVD-5 blank and you are willing to sacrafice quality and hours of time to get there.

Assuming that goal, the question becomes how much quality loss will you accept, spending how many hours per hour of encoding and are you willing to spend the big bucks for the best encoders? The best encoders might be expensive but they can remove the encode time and improve quality.

[jagabo]

Re the blurriness, I'm not sure. I just watched the DVD on TV and some of my really crisp JPG originals (resized 50% from 2816x2112 fresh from my Nixus 60 to 1408x1056 for more sensible handling) were definitely on the blurry side.

Anything on NTSC DVD will be 720x480 (720x576 PAL). And your TV probably can't even resolve the 720x480. Hence the blurriness.

[terrypin]

jagabo: Can you amplify a bit on that please, as I don't think I really follow. You're surely not saying that all my clips (originally crisp photos) must inevitably be 'blurry' when I view them on my 32" flat panel Panasonic? Because patently they are not!

Anyway, maybe that's now of less importance, as after further detective work I think I've found the cause. That is, why most of my images don't seem quite as sharp as they should be, and maybe 5% seem very poor.

But I need to do a bit more work on it before I can be sure. I'll report back then. Meanwhile, please clarify your point above.

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Terry, West Sussex, UK

[jagabo]

I was simply pointing out that no image on a movie DVD will ever have more resolution than 720x480 (720x576 PAL). That will obviously be blurrier than a 2816x2112 or 1408x1056 image when displayed at the same screen size.

Many people come here complaining that they can't read small text from a large image after burning to DVD.

If 5 percent of your images are much worse than others there is something else going on.

As to your other question about how much you can put on a DVD, it depends on the video and the quality level you can accept. The "2 hours" claimed on the DVD packaging is completely arbitrary. Bright, noisy, shaky, handheld camcorder footage may not look great even at 1 hour (9600 kbps). Dark, noise free, low motion, talking head video may look OK at 4 hours.

[terrypin]

Thanks jagabo, understood.

I have now established the cause. Not surprisingly it's pretty obvious in retrospect. In short, it's because of MM's flawed design, which particularly affects clips with effects applied.

I re-opened the project to make more careful observations of its 150 or so clips, and also discussed the issue elsewhere (including with the author of a plug-in effects package I use). I conclude:

1) Even with no effect applied, there is a little blurring, which is consistent with the MM design flaw. It seems MM starts effects (at least, those applied by plug-ins) from a resized image of only 640 x 480.

2) All clips are progressively more blurred when one or more zoom effects are applied.

I'm recommended to use PhotoStory instead, which I'm told makes a much better job of preserving original image quality. I did try PS some months ago but didn't use it enough to discover its merits. I now aim to do that, starting with re-doing this project. (BTW, if anyone here knows of any clever way of extracting my text overlay captions from MM, so that I don't have to tediously redo all of them from scratch in PS, that would be good!)

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Terry, West Sussex, UK

[guns1inger]

Photostory appears to use the same engine as MM for transitions and effects, and consequently produces soft output as well. It is a pitty, because the rest of the package is actually very good. It is fast to set up, simple to tweak, and if the output was other than wmv (and not artificially blurred along the way) it would be one of the best of it's kind.

I do all these effects from the Vegas timeline, but any editor that allows for track motion effects can do it.

[terrypin]

Thanks guns1inger. I'll report back after I've tried PhotoStory, as that seems to contradict what I was told by the programmer I mentioned.

Even though still only doing home stuff, I'm seriously considering moving up from MM or PS to the next level. (Well below Vegas!) An impulse buy in Borders a couple of days ago was 'Digital Video and DVD Authoring', a 2005 book by Jeff Sengstack, in the SAMS Teach Yourself series. He warmly recommends Pinnacle Studio (at around $99 USD). I got as far as downloading Studio10Trial.exe, 243 MB! But then some googling took me to countless horror stories about its unreliability. So, for now anyway, I've not even installed it. Did Sengstack back the wrong horse?

What alternative 'NLE entry level progs' would others recommend please?

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Terry, West Sussex, UK

[guns1inger]

Consider Vegas Movie Studio or Premiere Elements, or perhaps something like Ulead Video Studio. I would certainly consider these before Pinnacle.

[jagabo]

I found Pinnacle Studio 6, 7 and 8 to be fairly intuitive and easy to use. But the program was too buggy to be useful. As each new update/version came out a few bugs might have gotten fixed but a bunch more were introduced. I gave up after version 8 and from what I've read, the situation hasn't improved.

I've also used Ulead VideoStudio. I didn't find it as intuitive as Pinnacle, but it was much more stable. My version is a few years old so I can't say how good the latest versions are.