Produce DVD without jerky animation

[Pelel]

I think this is an old topic but really hope to resolve it this time. I use PTE V7 to produce a HD (1920x1080) MP4 using 100% quality and 60P and the MP4 video plays extremely well on my iMac 27" screen with the Quicktime player V10. The animation works very smoothly and I am delighted with this quality. However, once I imported the MP4 to iMovie (the clip was automatically optimised), the video output looks really jerky. Needless to say, the DVD produced correspondingly by iDVD exhibits the same jerky quality.

In addition to the PTE-MP4-to-iMovie/iDVD approach, I have also tried the PTE DVD feature but the animation result is also jerky!

So can anyone shed some light here whether it is the video editing/DVD burning software issue? Is there any way I can carry the superb MP4 quality to DVD production?

Thanks in advance.

Pele Leung

[Pelel]

Standard video DVDs and players are either 25i or 30i I believe. The resolution will also be much lower and the data rate is limited to 8 Mbps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video

If you have a blu-ray player you might be able to make a AVCHD DVD.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVCHD

Tom

Tom, are you saying standard DVD can never produce a smooth animation effect even the source input MP4 from PTE is very good? If so, the cause is more due to the bottleneck of cramping 60p data to 30p of standard DVD. In fact, I have also tried PTE 30p MP4 as the source and the result was the same - jerky.

I don't have a Blu-ray burner but do you think the Toast 11 with plugin (claim to be able to burn AVCHD video on standard DVD) can achieve what you expect - ie smoother animation?

Thanks in advance

Pele

[Lin Evans]

Hi Pele,

Not to answer for Tom, but the data rate is very important for smooth animation. The much greater data rate with BluRay or AVCHD will definitely give you "much" smoother animation than DVD, especially if you are pushing the limits of the bottleneck. Standard commercial movies on DVD use myriad techniques not available to ordinary users to smooth animation. Leading edge blur among other "tricks" are done with super expensive equipment to minimize jerky motion. It's quite possible to encode animation in an MP4 which simply can't be done correctly in the relevant sense with DVD.

I believe if you try AVCHD you will find it much, much better in every way than DVD - that is providing your player will actually "play" AVCHD. Not all BluRay players will. Check the specs before purchasing anything. A standard DVD player can "not" play AVCHD even thought AVCHD can be burned to the media with a standard DVD burner. It takes a BluRay player capable of playing AVCHD to play it back on an HD television.

Best regards,

Lin

[Pelel]

Thanks Tom and Lin. As per what you said, apparently I don't have better options (ways) to improve the DVD output at home office :-(

FYI, I have generated an MP4 with PTE (Quality 100 and 25f to match the PAL spec of PTE DVD) and import the video to iMovie/iDVD for quality comparison. Apparently the quality of the PTE DVD is slightly better with less flickering although the Apple's DVD menu is much more appealing than that of PTE :-(

As I am more a Mac user with only a Macbook with Bootcamp for Windows XP, I guess Toast 11 with the AVCHD plugin is the only option I can see if this is only way to improve the output. Unfortunately Toast 11 seems to receive a mixed bag of good and bad comments on many forums/reviews. Do you have any suggestion for other Mac products that can author AVCHD disc with MP4 input (from PTE)?

Pele, not Pete :-)

[Pelel]

Forgot to say one thing.... why PTE's DVD exhibits some compression (pixilation) defect even my source JPG photos are of extremely high quality (exported from Lightroom 3 in 100% without compression)? This is particularly noticeable in large screen such as my iMac 27" screen and photos in animation???????

Is there any way to ask PTE Video Builder to stop compression (such as specifying 100% quality for the quality parameter for MP4 generation function)?

Pele

[davegee]

Pele,

To produce a DVD from your 1920x1080 PTE Show it must be resized to fit within 720x576.

If you play this back on your Mac Monitor at 720x576 it will probably look OK. If you try to fill the screen it will look like C**P. On TV it is never going to look like the PTE EXE or even the MP4 but it will look better than the Computer Monitor.

I endorse Tom's suggestion. Create an ISO and burn the ISO in whatever software that you have. I use the equivalent of TOAST - Roxio 8.

I also echo what he said about using the MPEG4 file at 1920x1080 directly into the TV's Media Player via USB (if possible).

DG

[Pelel]

Thanks guys.

Re "If you play this back on your Mac Monitor at 720x576 it will probably look OK. If you try to fill the screen it will look like C**P"

I have tried to play the DVD with the original 720x576 screen size (ie not full screen mode on my iMac), the animation appears to be smoother. I suppose it is not fair to compare it to those commercial DVD production with expensive post-processing.

Re Tom's ISO suggestion, I will give it a try to confirm whether the quality is related to the DVD disc media.

Re the suggestion of playing MP4 on TV, I believe the quality will dramatically improve but at this stage this is not my preferred way of distributing my work due to the consideration of privacy and cost. I suppose it is much easier to copy files between USB stick than a DVD or AVDHC disc! Perhaps I should consider time-bombed .EXE or .APP on DVD data disc/download as a commercial distribution alternative.

Next, I will investigate how to make a better DVD menu instead of the given PTE templates.

Thanks all once again.

Pele