Low quality video problem when rendering to DV NTSC

parrim wrote on 3/22/2002, 8:14 PM
I have completed a video which includes AVI clips captured from my DV camcorder combined with transitions and overlayed text. I thought I was home free. Unfortunately when I render the AVI using the "DV NTSC" template the video loses quite a bit of quality and is particularly noticable on the text which comes out blocky.

If I render the a piece of the video to AVI uncompressed things look great but rendering a 60 minute video would result in a 100 gig file. I don't have that much space.

Can anyone comment on the quality of the DV NTSC codec in video factory 2.0c? Should I be getting better quality than I have described? I have already chosen "Best" render under the advanced tab.

I have un-installed every other video app I can think of thinking that there was another lesser quality codec on my machine taking over the render process but that seemed to have no effect. Is there a way to confirm the correct codec is actually being used?

Any help is very appreciated. I am very frustrated at this point.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/22/2002, 8:56 PM
My experience is that the DV rendered output is indistinguishable from the input. I've never noticed any loss of quality using it. Are you sure you're using the Sonic Foundry DV codec and not someone else's?
parrim wrote on 3/22/2002, 9:06 PM
Some other program may have overwritten my sonic foundry dv codec but I can't figure out how to confirm this or reverse it. I have un-installed and re-installed VV 2.0c and I have un-installed other video apps.

Does anyone know how to check for the sonic foundry codec on a machine?
Is there a simple way to ensure the codec is installed?
Do video vegas and video factory 2.0c use the same DV codec?

jimcho wrote on 3/23/2002, 1:29 AM
AFAIK, only Vegas uses the SF DV codec. VF uses the standard MS DV codec.

parrim, try this. Select Options/Preferences and check "Always use Sonic Foundry DV reader". Re-render and see if that does anything for you.
parrim wrote on 3/23/2002, 1:28 PM
After working late into the night I figured out that my AVI was looking blocky due to windows media player not being able to scale the picture gracefully to my 1024x768 screen. Windows Media does fine scaling uncompressed AVI so I had assumed that a visually poor preview of the AVI meant that the AVI itself was of poor quality - wrong! It turns out that the AVI quality was fine and once I encoded it to DVD MPEG 2 using TMPG everything looked great. PS: Anyone looking for a great MPEG 2 encoder should really look at TMPGPlus! Great product.

One trick others may want to try when having codec questions is to right click on the rendered AVI in windows explorer ( using Windows XP ). Under the options tab you will see the name of the codec used to compress the AVI video. If you are accidentally using a bad codec during encoding you will see it here.

Thanks for the replys. I hope this message archived saves somebody else from the same frustrations.