Mediocre quality. Couple of questions.

IndieBoy wrote on 9/18/2003, 3:59 PM
I have done a number of slideshows with VV, and the results are always great. The other night I decided to finally edit some video; the birth of my son, and burn it to DVD. I filmed the event with a Sony TRV30 minidv cam in widescreen mode.

Anyways, I opened up a widescreen project in VV and edited out quite a bit of video. I encoded to Mpeg-2 with the standard NTSC DVD template. After burning it with DVD architect I played it on my 55" Samsung Widescreen TV. The video looked worse than VHS. I was very dissapointed. Some motion even blurred. The source looks pretty good straight from the camera through the svideo cable to the TV, but after encoding to DVD and playing on my progressive scan JVC DVD player the quality is nasty.

Questions:

1. Should I film in standard mode? Not 16x9. I read somewhere that filming in 16x9 actually crops the image to 720x360, then stretches the pixels back to 720x480. Could this be the cause of the degradation in quality? I have a widescreen tv, and would like to watch my videos in the same aspect ratio. Is there a better way to do this?

2. Should I not expect too much considering the limitations of standard definition recording? When I bought my cam a few years ago, it had the best reviews as far as image quality is concerned.

3. I had horrible internal camera noise recorded on the tape. Is there an easy way to filter that out? I have read a bunch of tutorials, but they all seemed too time consuming. Should I just buy and external mic?

Thank you very much for any help you can provide.

Comments

craftech wrote on 9/18/2003, 5:30 PM
Maybe you were trying to jam too much footage on one DVD.

John
rextilleon wrote on 9/18/2003, 6:12 PM
Forget about 16:9 mode on that camera--its a gimmick more then anything else---I think thats where your problem is----If you want the 16:9 look you can add letter boxing when you are in Vegas---
IndieBoy wrote on 9/18/2003, 7:17 PM
I only had 20 minutes of video total. About 1 gb. Definetely not filling it up.

I will drop the 16x9 mode. Too bad I already filmed a bunch of stuff in that mode.
Paul_Holmes wrote on 9/18/2003, 10:05 PM
Been there, done that. You have to sit a long way back from a 55 inch to view DV widescreen without seeing every pixel magnified a 100 times. I use DVFilmmaker to convert my 16X9 to 4X3 letterboxed and make my DVD a 4X3 aspect ratio. So on a widescreen TV you're seeing 4X3 video letterboxed by the TV on each side and then letterboxed top and bottom by the video itself. Makes for a much cleaner sharper picture and no tearing out of the hair. To me this is the solution until we can actually get our hands on affordable HD cameras.