VV4 = Vegas Video V4.0b

Reading your post, I got the impression that you rendered to AVI in Vegas and let DVDA render to MPEG2. Sorry if I misread but it still reads that way to me.

(BTW, it is no longer VV - the "video" part has been dropped - it's just "Vegas")

Reading what numerous people have said about quality I'm beginning to think the problem may be either changes in the bitrate settings or just how various set top DVD players handle the file or just maybe the type of video being burned.* Not bragging... but I've tried and can't make a bad DVD with DVD-A. There is no ghosting or bluring and for sure there is no pixelation. Even if I use MPEG files as source to begin with, while softer, the quality is still very good. So all things being equal I'm stumped why some keep saying their DVD quality isn't as good as they think it should be.

* some DVD's may show some signs of breakdown IF there is a lot of fast action, sometimes just ripples in water can drop the quality a little, things like that.

But for your typical DVD I haven't see the things others have mentioned. That being said, what am I doing others aren't? Nothing special. I'm mostly using a Canon ZR45 camera (hardly a fancy camera) and usually use TDK or JVC tapes, but I doubt that makes much differnce. I have an older Pioneer model #333 DVD set top player which was rated very highly over at VCDHELP, when I bought it about a year ago.

What I may be doing different others aren't is I do take a lot of time with color correction and levels and color curves. So some of the minor imperfections others see, I may be masking. Also I'm almost a fanantic** when it comes to properly calibrating both the external monitor I use for editing and the various TV's I use to view the finish product. Again, shouldn't make that big a difference, but again, its hard to judge quality without seeing aside from something obvious like ghosting or pixelating.

** many people set the sharpness on their TV sets WAY TOO HIGH. Pushing the level all the way up does NOT produce a sharper picture. In fact doing that will give some of the fuzziness some are describing. You really need to adjust sharpness, sometimes called focus when looking at a really good quality test pattern, ideally one off of a DVD disc or if you must use a transmitted one, one off a high quality cable hook up for example.

Thanks for your replies.

I
1. Import DV form my PC3 Sony camcorder.
2. Edit in Vegas.
3. Save with Vegas as mpeg2 file.
4. Import file into DVDA.
5. Burn as NTSC DVD, 8 Meg bit rate.

Where could my biggest loss be, step 3. or 5. and how could I improve on it?

1) Personally I believe that TMPGEnc and CCE Basic are both better than Vegas' MPEG2 encoder, but the difference is more visible at lower bitrates. At 8Mbps everything should look pretty good.

2) I have found significant differences between set-top DVD players. Pioneer in particular seems quite good, I have a Pioneer DV-343. Its output looks very good on the very same DVD that on a friend's player (forgot the brand) looked a little bit jagged and "pixely". Quite possibly he had his TV sharpness turned up, too. I always keep my TV sharpness setting at 0, it looks best there. Many consumer TVs are set to default for what looks good when playing VHS tapes, but that is not optimum for DVD.

See... it's #5 that's confusing me. Are you letting DVDA RECOMPRESS the Mpeg file? If so, DON'T - it will use the MPEG file straight from Vegas with NO changes.

Steve672
i have the same camcorder Sony PC3, the dvd quality i made is awesome.
i do not change any setting in vv4 and dvd-a, the only thing i did is, render video as dvd-a video stream(best quality) and audio as (AC-3 stereo without compression, set normalize -31db). thats all. i have rendered my first video project as 'good quality' but still pretty good. now i select best quality for all mpeg-2 rendering.
take them right in dvd-a for burning dvd.

Mpeg2 is not recompressed