-= How can I convert to Mpeg2 with Perfect quality? =-

[J Crew]

alright, you may have seen this post question by someone else, and i have the same basic question but from a different source. i'm capturing via firewire to my hard drive from my sony DV. i just burned my first DVD last night and was very upset at the quality that i got. i used adobe premiere 6 to do my editing and then exported to .avi. after that i encoded to mpeg2 using uleads moviefactory... and i encoded at the highest quality (8000 or something?), and then burned the dvd with uleads moviefacory. my problem is that everytime there are fast movments or when i zoom in or out... everything gets blocky or i get little lines through everything. how can i fix this? is it possible? i mean i paid out my ass for all this equiptment that i have and then purchased a dvd-r drive and editing programs... and what i've produced is crap. i've read about tmpegenc... and have considered downloading it and trying to use it, but am unsure what i put the setting at. i've also heard mixed reviews about it. i've read a few places that have said if you're burning to DVD, that tmpegenc isn't any good... that you should use a different encoding program. any truth to this? please let me know how i can get really great video quality. it doesn't have to be perfect, but i do expect "great" quality with all the money i've spent. thanks

ps -
* your source? ie, capture or dvd - sony dv camcorder / firewire card
* your settings, vcd or svcd? - DVD
* viewing on a TV or PC? - TV
* resolution - 720x480
* what R U'r quality issues, ie, blocks, etc. - blocks during even semi fast motion and streaks or lines in motion too.

[martp]

Hi J

If you find the answer, let me know. I have exactly the same problem converting to an MPEG 1 VCD format, but with worse results because of the 352 x 288 format.

From what I've read through this site, you'll never get perfect results, even though working totally in digital format. Being an amateur, I can only put this down to compressing an avi file to a fraction of its original size to fit onto a disc. Still, I get nothing near the quality of a commercially bought VCD.

After creating the avi file through the firewire download, by looking at each frame, the worst thing I find is the field interlacing effect on vertical lines, especially if the camera is panning horizontally. I have had some success in applying de-interlacing filters available in Virtualdub. Try giving this a go before editing and converting to MPEG2

[Urbs]

Here is my theory....

First of all, the blockiness is caused by some form of MPEG compression.

So knowing that, there are a couple possible places you're video could get compressed.

1) When you capture the video to the hard drive, what format is it in? Is your capture program compressing the video as it's saving it on the hard drive? Make sure it saves it in an uncompressed format, or better yet, a lossless compression format (like the Huffyuv codec). The only problem is that you will use a lot of hard disk space.

2) After you edit in Adobe Premiere 6, you said to export to an .avi file. This is what might be tricking you. Depending on what codecs you have installed, the AVI file format could be uncompressed or it could be a DiVX (MPEG4) compressed format. Try saving the edited file to an uncompressed format.

If the previous 2 steps compressed the video too much, than what ever bitrate you select for your conversion to MPEG2 will not help with the blockiness.

I'm not sure if what I wrote above is 100% correct, but it's just a theory, and it will give you something to investigate.

Let me know what you find...

[J Crew]

1) When you capture the video to the hard drive, what format is it in? Is your capture program compressing the video as it's saving it on the hard drive? i'm capturing and saving as "dv .avi" in premiere 6. i'm not sure if this is a compressed .avi or not... is it?

that's a pretty good idea, thanks for that input. i'll try to save as an uncompressed .avi next time and see if this helps. but what about converting after this? what program should i use to convert to a mpeg2 dvd ready file? like stated in first post, i've heard mixed reviews about using tmpegenc for burning to dvd, anyone have any experience with this? thanks again for the help, peace