Need some Rendering Advice

Distorshun wrote on 12/23/2005, 7:52 AM
I recently recorded a wedding for a friend of mine, and I'm going to make a DVD for them. I only have a handheld MiniDV camcorder, and the lighting was somewhat dark during the reception. I added some brightness and contrast to the video, so as far as the actual video stream, I think I've done as well as I can. I think I'm losing some quality when I render though, and wanted to see if I could get some advice.

Currently I'm rendering it as a Main Concept MPG-2, NTSC Video Stream. I went into custom to try to increase the quality. I'm using "Best", I slid the picture quality to the right (31 I think), clicked the "double-pass" checkbox, and selected max rate 9,800,000. I'm rendering audio seperately.

Is that the best setting to use, or can I try something else to get better quality? (After I render the video, I'm going to put it into DVD Architect 3 to make a DVD.) I read Dave's comments about closing the preview window during rendering...will that help with the quality, or just the speed?

Any advice would be much appreciated!
Thanks!

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 12/23/2005, 8:22 AM
The 9,800,000 figure is the MAXIMUM allowable DVD bitrate of both the video and audio combined. It's usually best for compatibilty purposes with various DVD players to keep the max combined bitrate under 9.8 Mbits.

If the video is under around 70 minutes and you will be using AC3 audio, then just set the MPEG2 encoder to CBR at 8,000,000. Setting the slider to 31 is always a good idea. Two pass encoding is only useful when the length of your video dictates that you must use an average bitrate under 8 Mbits in order to fit it on a single DVD. The key parameter in two pass encoding is the average bitrate.

Closing the preview window will only help the speed. The fact that your video was shot under low light conditions and you have had to crank up the brightness means that the video noise has also been increased. The way MPEG2 compression works is by encoding the difference in the pixels between frames and noisy video is the most difficult to compress because the noise causes all the pixels in each frame to be different. This takes more bits to encode. Nevertheless, encode CBR at 8,000,000 and it will look as good as possible.

If the video is longer than 70 minutes, post a message here with the link and we can tell you what the optimum average bitrate should be. There are also a lot of online DVD bitrate calculators that will also tell you. Here's one:

Videohelp.com bitrate calculator

John
JJKizak wrote on 12/23/2005, 8:26 AM
1...Do not use the 9.8 bitrate setting. That is the total that the DVD can handle. Some players will even choke on 8.4 megs. Use the 8 meg setting as the audio and other items you add in DVD-A3 will add to the bitrate over the 8 meg setting.
2...According to some the dual pass should only be used for bitrates in the 4 meg range.

JJK
Distorshun wrote on 12/23/2005, 10:10 AM
The video is only 25 minutes, I'm only working on the ceremony right now. Just wanted to make sure that the render settings I'm using are as good as I can get them. The problem is the camera and the lighting...I probably need to try to get a prof. quality camera off of ebay or something :)

I'll re-render the video using your suggestions.
Thanks!