I need to compress video to DVD but the quality is always lower...

[tzanaglio]

Does anyone know what to do to maintain the video quality when transferring raw digital video to DVD? I shoot with a Canon XL-1s and the video looks fantastic before I put it to DVD. 1 hour of digital video though is around 12 gigs. I've tried many ways to compress it to fit on a DVD, but every time I do it looks horrible, nothing like the original. I've seen a lot of low budget/homemade films in the 1-2 hour range that were put on DVD and they still look great. Is this something that requires a specific software to do, or does it need to be encoded a certain way? I'm still learning how to author DVD's obviously, just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

[jagabo]

Video "quality" encompasses a lot of different things. What exactly is wrong with the DVDs you make? Brightness/contrast issues? Color shifts? Jerky video? Blocky artifacts? What software have you tried already?

[tzanaglio]

I've only tried windows movie maker so far for DVD authoring. I thought they were all pretty much the same, but now I'm thinking maybe not. The problem I'm having is that my original video will be, for example, my daughter's Christmas play video 30 mins in length, and be around 6 gigs in file size. I'll do some editing with wmm and save the final video to my computer so I can author it later. I can't use the highest quality(DVI) to save it because it would be too big to fit on a DVD, and oddly, sometimes it comes out even larger than the original video. The quality problem I'm having is that, in the original, the video quality looks almost as crisp as a live news broadcast When I attempt to compress it, it looks like something shot with a webcam. I recently purchased a laptop that has adobe premier elements on it, but I haven't had time to read up on how to use it yet. Do you think this program, or Adobe Premier pro, might allow me to maintain a higher quality when saving/compressing an edited video, or possibly a better DVD authoring program?

[guns1inger]

You say you save the video to your HDD for authoring later. What format, and with what settings, is the video you save ?

[tomlee59]

You can't write DV to DVD directly, not because of its size, but because it's not DVD-compliant (read "What is DVD" in the upper left corner). You must use MPEG2, and only certain specific resolutions are allowed.

Within the constraints of DVD, you have essentially only bitrate to modulate quality. Sure, the quality of the encoder matters, too, but once you've selected that, bitrate is the main knob to turn.

Understand that you are going to lose quality each time you transcode from one codec to another. So, one extremely important rule is to minimize the number of conversions. If your camera is outputting DV, edit in DV, as it is only lightly compressed. Yes, it's going to consume huge amounts of disk space. But if quality is important to you, you have no choice but to accept that tradeoff. You can have high quality OR small filesize, but not both. Only when you're done editing do you perform one final conversion to DVD's MPEG2, using the highest practical bitrates (two things set the upper bound: filesize limitations, and DVD player limitations -- keep the peak bitrate below about 9Mb/s).

[tzanaglio]

Thanks for the information! I picked up a 1.5 terrabyte external HD and that solved my problem. I really appreciate the help.

[edDV]

I've only tried windows movie maker so far for DVD authoring. I thought they were all pretty much the same, but now I'm thinking maybe not. The problem I'm having is that my original video will be, for example, my daughter's Christmas play video 30 mins in length, and be around 6 gigs in file size. I'll do some editing with wmm and save the final video to my computer so I can author it later. I can't use the highest quality(DVI) to save it because it would be too big to fit on a DVD, and oddly, sometimes it comes out even larger than the original video. The quality problem I'm having is that, in the original, the video quality looks almost as crisp as a live news broadcast When I attempt to compress it, it looks like something shot with a webcam. I recently purchased a laptop that has adobe premier elements on it, but I haven't had time to read up on how to use it yet. Do you think this program, or Adobe Premier pro, might allow me to maintain a higher quality when saving/compressing an edited video, or possibly a better DVD authoring program?

You need a better workflow and better software.

WMM can be used for simple DV editing but any filtering will rescale to 640x480 and possibly deinterlace.

If you just cut in WMM, you must export to DV-AVI (under "other") not WMV. WMV will deinterlace and apply extreme compression. You don't want either for DVD.

You didn't mention your version of Adobe Premiere Elements but it is a good practice program.

Here are the steps to follow.

1a. Capture the video from the camcorder with Premiere. Be sure to use the IEEE-1394 (Firewire) cable.

1b. Alternatively, use a very simple fool proof program WinDV for capture to a DV-AVI file.

2. Locate the DV-AVI capture file or files in the Premiere bin. You can import DV-AVI files captured with WinDV.

3. Set project to NTSC DV (720x480i, 29.97 lower field first).

4. Edit your video.

5. Encode to DVD MPeg2 (720x480i, 29.97 lower field first) but increase the default average bit rate from 6Mb/s to at least 8Mb/s.

6. Follow Premiere Elements instructions for authoring a DVD.