DVD has poor quality with dark footage

mvpvideos2007 wrote on 3/19/2003, 3:42 PM
I have a wedding demo that when it comes to the reception footage on the DVD, the picture has slightly pixelated. When the picture has a good light source, it is fine. The video itself looks great from beginning to end, but the DVD doesn't fair well with darker video images? Am I doing something wrong?

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 3/19/2003, 4:59 PM
You can try to increase the bitrate, but dark video is very difficult to get a clean picture out of when going to DVD. Anything Dark with Motion, or stuff like trees blowing in the background of a shot will always cause problems when going to DVD.
john-beale wrote on 3/19/2003, 8:34 PM

There are several things you can do but they take some time and experimentation. You can try to filter the dark footage. Prefiltering is key to improving your MPEG2 (DVD) results. You can do spatial filtering, which reduces noise by smoothing out each frame (in the simplest case, simply averaging) and also temporal filtering, by looking at corresponding pixels in the previous and the next frame. Some trial-and-error is necessary to find settings that give the best overall appearance with noisy footage, trading off "blocky" type MPEG artifacts (bitrate being overwhelmed with the pixel noise- too many pixels changing each frame) on the one hand, with excessively low resolution, or blurring of motion on the other hand.

I don't think Vegas has a native temporal filter, but just today, Satish released a package that enables you to use some external filters in Vegas, I belive a temporal cleaner filter is among them. http://www.debugmode.com/pluginpac/

Also, you can try external MPEG2 encoders, like the just-released CinemaCraft Encoder Basic http://www.cinemacraft.com/eng/ccebasic.html which probably does better than the Vegas built-in encoder. Also, TMPGEnc from http://www.tmpgenc.net can do very well, it has adjustable built-in spatial and temporal filtering and at high enough bitrates (eg. 8000 kbps) can do a good job with most material.
BillyBoy wrote on 3/19/2003, 8:55 PM
For noise use the latest plug-in or pre render using Virtual Dub. For levels check out my tutorials for specific how-to. It is now very easy to adjust levels in Vegas with the new Color Corector filter which comines the levels filter and hue adjusments in one filter plus it add gain. Combined to get very good result and lighten dark videos easily. Also don't forget my favorite Color Curves.