Best Compression for DVD, or uncompressed DVD?

chap wrote on 1/25/2008, 1:01 AM
I finished a project, edited in Vegas 7.0, which used many high resolution pictures and animations which i made in combustion and TVPaint.

the uncompressed file was used to play off a projection system, and looked great. However, the client wants to use these in plasma displays, and the DVD looks very low resolution.

I rendered from Vegas and then used DVD architect for DVD burn, which compressed it to MPEG2.

the project file properties are

PAL 720 x 576
Frame Rate 25.00
Field Order None (Progressive)
Pixel Aspect Ratio 1.4568

what is the best way to get a higher resolution DVD?

thanks
matt

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 1/25/2008, 6:28 AM
This gets asked a lot.
DVDs are MPEG-2, which is a compressed format.
The amount of compression depends on your disc capacity and length of your movie. More compression = a smaller file and lower playback quality.
DVD Architect automatically "fits" your movie to the disc by adjusting the compression of the file.
There is more control over the amount and type of compression if you create your MPEG-2 file in Vegas, however you need to calculate the amount needed to fit the material on the disc.
Generated media such as yours is always going to look worse in a compressed format. It's just a fact of life.
How long is your movie? Anything over 1-1/2 hours on a 4.7GB disc is going to take a noticeable quality hit.
LOTS more info/tutorials on videohelp.com and VASST
MPM wrote on 1/31/2008, 6:47 PM
What's the client using to drive the plasma screens now? If a BR player, go BR? If up-converting player, does it handle DivX? IOW perhaps a good solution would be to abandon the limitations of your frame size, which after all is pretty limiting. A projector enlarges optically, so with a slide for example, it works. A picture the same size as the slide OTOH isn't going to enlarge digitally on your PC and not look terrible -- you've got to add resolution, same as an up-converting player, and going to an HD frame would do that.

Otherwise you might try fine-tuning the mpg2 encoding, keeping it progressive but playing with the other stuff like the matrix and method of motion prediction. You'd work with your existing avi, probably wouldn't be doing it in Vegas, and improvements would be based on the idea that your project doesn't match the average video that Vegas' encoder was tuned for (most video isn't stills & animation). If you really want to get picky, set the encoder per scene, doing one at a time and combining the results.
chap wrote on 3/18/2008, 8:22 AM
the movie is only 2:47 seconds, and it is at 25 fps PAL widescreen.

I rendered it to MPG-2 using a constant bitrate, but now when i go to put it in DVD Architect it still says recompression is required because the bitrate is not a DVD friendly rate.

310 MB should fit on a DVD, and uncompressed it is only 710 MB, so i am still confused as to what to do with the DVD stream.

thanks
matt
MarkWWWW wrote on 3/18/2008, 8:57 AM
2:47 is 167 seconds

310MB for a 167 second fiile is a data rate of about 14.85 Mbps.

The maximum data rate for a DVD is 9.8Mbps. (For safety it is often recommended not to exceed 8Mbps.)

I suspect that the high data rate is the reason DVDA wants to recompress your video.

Mark