DVD PICTURE QUALITY

[WALTJONES]

Have just copied latest version P2E show to DVD using Ulead MF2. Quality of picture only fair on PanasonicTX-28PK2/E. Am using Phillips DVD writer and Bush DVD player with full screen video display 720 by 576 PAL. A 50/60 refresh rate Pal and NTSC. Digital bit stream processing rate up to 10.08 Mbits/sec.

Problem is a very noticable lack of steadyness of image specially in highlights although dissolves are good. Not seen this problem mentioned previously. I do not really know what standard of picture is'normal' for DVD pictures. Would a higher quality DVD player be the answer? The Bush player now 18 months old was fairly cheap.Can anybody help please? I have incidently shewn the DVD show at its normal picture format but the problem remains.

WALTJONES

[quickflicks]

with full screen video display 720 by 576 PAL.

Pal is: 768 x 576 you might have a slight distortion on the horizontal axis.

Try to crop to this size and see if it helps.

I have only teorethical knowledge because I have not burned my first disk.

[nickles]

Walt:

I experienced similar problems. Is the unsteadiness sort of like jaggie lines? It may well be ULEAD's encoder. I'm not real familiar with what they've got. The following is an excerpt of a post I made on an earlier thread:

"I use DV encoders by Pinnacle, and Panasonic as well as a M-JPEG encoder made by Morgan Multimedia for producing AVI files. For making MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 files from AVI, I predominately use the Cinema Craft encoder and sometimes TMpgenc. I also have encoders that come with NERO 6, Pinnacle Studio, and Roxio that I never use. If I make a true AVI before I encode into MPEG, I get jittery slides especially along horizontal lines with all AVI encoders execpt the Morgan. By going direct from PTE Video Encoder direct to the Cinema Craft mpeg encoder, I get highly stable and clear slideshows on my TV...in fact much better than I expected. This jitter must have something to do with the still picture. If I use the Morgan M-JEG and create a true AVI (select the Codec as custom in PTE) before I encode the MPEG I get reasonablly stable non-jittery slides but not as good as going direct to Mpeg with the PTE encoder. The DV encoders are terrible for stills but excellent for normal motion movies. I consider the Tempgenc and Cinemacraft encoders as equivalent in quality but the Cinemacraft is a little over twice as fast. I haven't figured the PTE Video Encoder, must be a pure frame server."

The full thread is here:

Resizing for AVI?

The technique dexcribed here works beautiful for me:

My PTE to DVD Method

The problems is it will cost about $150 US for the Cinemacraft encoder and DVD-Lab software. I run a Windows 2000 OS. Made many DVD's of home movies with it as well as PTE slideshows. I think there's limited trials available for both.

I don't think the jitter problem is PTE's.

I found this noise to be very sensitive to the encoding method. You may not have any choice of encoding with ULEAD?...If you have access to the TMPGEnc encoder, it may work...Hope this helps...Ken

[WALTJONES]

Very many thanks for response and ideas. I have a feeling that we are in very early days to get really good results in transfering P to E to DVD. I have now discovered that the quality of different DVD players varies enormously. Some of the playback is dreadful and so much so that the medium is a complete waste of time at the moment as a general means of showing presentations. Back to the PC! Best wishes everybody.

WALTJONES