Authored DVD video echo-y effect

[mjf17]

Here's the situation, I hope someone can help. I'll give the issue first then give some background info.

Some scenes in my DVD look fine. Other scenes look almost like there is a video echo behind every movement. It's kind of like mouse trails only it's just one trail. Like if an object moves across the screen it'll kind of have a shadow right behind it. Only it's not a shadow, it's just the same thing but right behind it. For example, the footage is of my 7 month old daughter. When she's in the swing, she looks like she has 4 eyes because as she is swinging back and forth, the "echo" follows her. And it's not just her eyes, it's every part of the picture that is in motion. Also, it's not just high motion scenes, it's also slow motion scenes. It is only noticeable when I play it on my set top player (Panasonic RV-30). It doesn't show up on my software DVD Player or in my Honda Odyssey (which plays on a 7" LCD screen).

Background info: The footage is captured from 8mm Hi-8 using VirtualDub. It's captured to AVI using the PicVideo MJPEG codec. I assembled all the different AVIs in Premiere and used the CCE 2.50 plugin to generate the MPEG2 stream. I used 2-pass VBR, avg of 6Mbps, Min 2Mbps, Max 9Mbps. I used DVDMaestro to author the DVD, putting in menus, chapter breaks, etc. The audio was a 48KHz PCM WAV file. I compiled to disk first and then burned with Nero. I have the Sony DRU-500A Firmware 1.0f and I always burn to the +RW that comes with the drive to test. I can only test it using the software DVD player because my Panasonic doesn't take +RWs. Everything looked fine on the computer but when I burned to the Ritek 2x -R, several scenes had that weird motion-y echo effect. Others did not.

I thought it might be a problem with the MPEG2 encoding, so I went back to Premiere and frameserved the video into TMPGEnc. I used CBR 6Mbps, I chose to encode non-interlaced and turned on the Deinterlace filter. When that was done, I re-imported that stream into DVDMaestro and re-authored and re-burned to another Ritek -R. Now, the scenes that were messed up before are fine BUT other scenes which were fine in the first try are now messed up in the same way.

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?! I can't notice any difference when I play back the +RW or either -R in my computer. When I play the -Rs in the Odyssey, it looks fine also. But the effect is so noticeable when I playback on the Panasonic RV-30 that it gives me motion sickness.

I have backed up a couple commercial DVDs and have not seen this effect. I have also created one other DVD with my own footage and I DID see this effect there...but again, not through the whole thing, just certain scenes. Sorry for the long post but can anyone help?

-mjf17

[mjf17]

Just FYI that I figured out the problem, in case anyone else has it. It was a Field problem, i.e. some clips were Top Field First, the others were Bottom Field First.

My source video was actually several AVI clips assembled together in Premiere. Those sources were captured using VirtualDub. I used the PicVideo MJPEG Codec. Somehow, the field must have switched when I did some captures.

I figured it out after reading this: http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=122499

So, I used TMPGEnc and encoded the right clips with the right field order, assembled the MPEG2 clips using DVDMaestro and it works fine.