How do pros do it ?

[Poplar]

I have been doing poor man's DVD, a.ka. SVCD/CVD , for a while. I think I should be satisfied with results, considering the equipment and software I have. CCE is an exception. It's God's gift to us. Anyway, what I want to know is, how do pros, i.e., Hollywood studios, make their DVDs? Jim Taylor's DVD FAQ provides some info and isn't detailed enough. Can any of you gurus offer a play by play view of the whole process of making of a DVD by a studio? The most important part is:

--How do they transfer raw footage into MPEG-2 stream, what kind of encoding scheme they use, software encoding or hardware encoding? what kind of software and hardware do they use?

I heard some studios send their raw footage to a data compression center and let them do compression, then do the authoring part in-house. Tha's probably why I often see credits like "Compressed by XYZ" at the end of a movie.

Maybe some of these info are trade secret? Can anyone give it a shot?

[snowmoon]

The big advantage they have is the SOURCE! Input quality is beyond anything that us poor consumers get. If I had studio quality source I could make SVCD that are nothing short of DVD quality 99% of the time. Studios also have hardware and time.

Personally the quality of my SVCD's are just about broadcast quality, and depending on the DVD/TV combo their is no diffrence ( my tv is a LITTLE revealing 42" HDTV widescreen ). I'm trying to only use CVD for the most demanding stuff ( cartoons ).

For the poor man's DVD my biggest quality improvements fall into 2 categories. Breakthroughs in nosie reduction and serendipity. Noise and other poor source issues eat most of the quality. I learend how to use vdub preview + histogram to tune the bt878 card for optimal brightness and contrast. I've tried every NR filter in vdub availible to see how they affect video and output quality. I use CCE exclusivly for mpeg-2 encoding tweaked for best SVCD quality. I use toolame exclusivly for mp2 encoding.

[thxkid]

yes SVCD is good, but still not up to DVD, since I switched from XSVCD and XVCD to DVD, big improvemnt in quality, also ALL!! professionals use TBC on all their equipment and not this cheap 3-4 line stuff we see on Camcorders or VCR's I mean full frame TBC, I have seen a huge improvement on lower sources when using a full frame TBC like the one on the Panasonic DMR-E20 or E30 and its still not as good as the $50,000+ TBC's the Pro's use. Having $5,000 to $10,000 worth of equipment can't even compare to the millions the Studio's are using.

[snowmoon]

If switching from SVCD to DVD hade a huge diffrence then you were doing something wrong, you have seriously upgraded your capture equipment in the process, or your dvd/tv is excepyionally revealing. You can't fairly compare a $40 bt878 capture card to a 3d comb filtered and TBC's capture equipment.

[pacoreguenga]

Yep, studios use expensive tbc's, all equipment is often genlocked to a grass valley sgnal generator, (even capture cards) and they use ccir601 4:2:2 or better signals through SDI connections. Sometimes they use rt encoding hardware costing as much as a Ferrari, sometimes they just use uncompressed video gear and software encoding that costs twice as much as the RT solutions. Common sources are Betacam Digital, D1 or D9. Sometimes they use HD equipment and software encoding. Have you ever heard of Discreet Logic's Inferno and Smoke? They are very useful tools in this situations and run on expensive Irix Workstations (SGI). But the Cinewave path is becoming stronger and cheaper, as Sonic Scenarist runs fine on Mac, NT, and Irix plattforms.