Dave,
I have tried everything in the options to make the best mpg2 video and no matter what its just not as smooth. Is this always the case? Perhaps I don't know the difference of dvd (professional) because I never saw the original which also may be much smoother.

Jpg can be so good that you can't tell the difference from an original uncompressed tif file. Then again I don't believe the picture quality is what suffers. It's simply the smooth motion.

Anyone else have some wisdom on this.

Auggy

I haven't had any problems with my mpeg-2's being un-smooth. Are you playing them on a DVD player or from your computer?

The very nature of digital video hinges on lossy compression; it will never be as good as the original analog. If your AVI is not compressed as much as the mpeg 1 or 2 then it would be of higher quality [MJPEG and mpeg 1 are similar and don't utilize frame to frame difference compression of mpeg2]. Thus mpeg2 would give better quality than mpeg1 if the total compression were identical [however, a 5:1 mpeg1 would be superior to a 100:1 mpeg2]. Content has a lot to do with it. Mpeg2 cannot tolerate zooms well as they mean that there is little common area frame to frame. Mpeg1 works on a standalone frame basis and has no problem with zooms. Best source of info is the look under the hood of the different codecs....

What bitrate are you using when you create your MPEG file? If you bitrate is too high then your player might simply be unable to read the bits from the file fast enough to display every frame. With my DVD player i can playback about 4Mbps from a CD-R, but if i go up to 4.5 then it starts skipping badly. It can handle about 9Mbps from a DVD-R but anything above that starts skipping too. If you're playing the files on your computer then its possible that the computer can't handle decoding the data above a certain rate. When the bitstream is too fast, the player will skip occasional frames in order to catch up with the stream.

A DV avi can be compressed using MPEG2 at a bitrate of about 8Mb/sec to look pretty much identical to the original DV avi. If there is little video noise in the original, then the bitrate can be substantially reduced--Hollywood DVDs typically run in the range of 4-6Mb/sec. I don't think these low bitrates are because of better encoding, since you can get software encoders such as CinemaCraft that are very good, but rather the low bitrates are due to the noise-free source images (35mm film).

I did a project a few months back that had over two hours on a DVD-R blank. That much material means a low bitrate is necessary(~4.5Mb/sec). Even so, the results were excellent once I did a video-noise-reduction pass over the source material before encoding.

I somehow missed that the avi was dv; if 25 Mbs dv--common on consumer grade cameras, this is a compressed, lossy format to begin with; so your dvd should be as good as the avi. Now if your avi were uncompressed capture using a dps reality, video toaster, targa 3000, etc. and your source were NTSC video straight from the camera rather than tape; there is no way your dvd could compare in quality.
Adam Wilt is sort of a defacto standard and he likes dv so I may be overly pessimistic in that I deal oftimes with scientific quality video rather than just what a human perceives from a movie, see his insights
http://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-tech.html#DVformats

im looking on it on my pc. I'll try messing with the bitrates some more.
I don't think its the comp. The motions loss is stable throughout the video.
I am getting in a dvd burner this week -
by the way if anyone hasnt got one tigerdirect has em for 119.00 bucks

not too bad.

I'll keep everyone posted

Thanks for the help all