Got a brand new GS-120...and then....

skanji wrote on 4/22/2005, 1:07 PM
*POOF* I am losing quality on my video.

OK, here's the story.

The quality of my video is great on my camera, it is great when i capture it to my computer as an avi file, but the problem is, when I render it, I can see a more blurry overall shot (as an MPEG-2).

I am rendering it as an MPEG-2 file for ultimately displaying as a dvd. How do I get the avi quality onto the DVD? What should I render it as?

I have done searches, but most responses are MPEG-2 is the best quality. If that's the case, I will be really disappointed.

To be clear, I am very happy with the quality of the capture as an AVI file - now I just want to get it on the darn DVD with that same quality - and MPEG2 doesn't seem to do it for me...

Thoughts guys?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 4/22/2005, 1:27 PM
Well, MPEG-2 isn't the best quality available, however, it's your only choice for DVD so you're stuck with it. Quality is highly dependant on the bitrate. Higher bitrates retain more of the original image. You can probably go up to about 9Mbps. Also, under the Video tab in the Custom options is a slider for "Video quality:", make sure you move this all the way to High. Variable bit rate encoding can look better than Constant bit rate, sometimes. It also allows the option for Two-pass encoding. This mostly helps the resulting file to be as small as possible, but since that allows you to use a higher bitrate then there is a possible side effect of increased quality too.

What settings have you been using?
John_Cline wrote on 4/22/2005, 1:52 PM
Well, first of all, MPEG2 is the only choice for making DVD's. DVD's are MPEG2 and there's no way around that. But there is nothing inherently wrong with MPEG2.

Now, about the quality of your MPEG2 renders... don't use the Vegas default template. Choose the 'DVD Architect" template instead. If your video is under an hour, hit the "Custom" button and go to the "Video" tab. Set it to "Constant Bitrate" at 8,000,000. Make sure the "Video Quality" slider is set at "31." If your video is over an hour, you will need to use two-pass "Variable bitrate" and you can use one of the many online DVD bitrate calculators to determine the best settings for Maximum, Average and Mininum bitrates.

In any event, you will need to render out the audio separately. If you're making NTSC DVD's, then you would generally want to choose to render the audio out as a 192kbps stereo AC3 audio stream. There is a "custom" tweak to the AC3 audio of which you should be aware, AC3 applies dynamic range compression by default and this isn't usually desirable, so select AC3 as the render type and hit the "Custom" button and go to select the Preprocessing tab. From the Line mode profile drop-down list, choose None. From the RF mode profile drop-down list, choose None.

Anyway, if you use the correct settings and a high enough bitrate, there is no reason your MPEG2 renders can't look as good as your original .AVI files.

John
skanji wrote on 4/22/2005, 1:59 PM
Excellent suggestions guys. I have been using the default settings due to my fear of the unknown.

You guys have really made it clear, and I will try it the next time around.

Incidently, the videos don't render that well on my computer, but look great on the tv!