I have been pleased with the quality of DVDs made in DVDA.

Both Farss and WobblyBoy make valid points. When done right (and that begins with shooting quality video to start with), the results can be excellent. I am extremely happy with the quality that Vegas + DVD delivers. It comes highly recommended in my book!

J--

Thanks very much for these replies. I guess that to get the best video quality on a DVD, your project needs to be no longer than 60 minutes? In other words, with a DVD TV recorder, you can only get 60 minutes' worth of the highest grade of video. Does this also apply to DVD Architect?

Regards, Fred

You can do a quick test of output quality by looping 10'ish seconds of your timeline and rendering it to file several times using different settings each time (call the rendered files "quick test A, B, C, etc" or something and write down what settings you used for each.) Then play them with various players. This allows you to see the difference side by side of the all the optional formats and settings.
The "Draft (Auto)" will give you the smoothest movement and the "Best (Full)" is most sutable for when you are paused and want to take a look at details up close such as when chroma keying.

Personally, I've done 120 minute analog video to DVD and it looks just as good as the original.

With MiniDV, I've decided to cut my max down to 90 minutes.

Looks terrific...yes...with DVD-A.

The Main Concept MPG2 encoder does a very good job.

With DVDA you can use VBR mpeg2 and ac3 audio. Firstly this cuts down the amount of space used by the audio to leave more for the video (read you can encode at a higher bitrate). Also VBR gives better use of the available bandwidth.
My main objection to STB DVD recorders is trying to add chapter points can be a real apin and no real choice of menus etc. Mind you I've only used the Philips unit, maybe the other brands are a bit better.
If all your looking to do though is make DVDs from off air material sure Vegas and DVDA would eat that up but seems a bit of overkill to me. If you're looking to do something a bit more creative then you're sure in the right place.

Right now I'm trying Procoder 1.5 and it seems VERY good using 5000 bps bitrate (2-pass, Mastering quality).
It took 5 hours to encode a 55 minute clip...

In Speed mode the quality is about the same as MC encoder and my 2.4G PIV does it in real time (55 m clip = 55 m encoding).

"I guess that to get the best video quality on a DVD, your project needs to be no longer than 60 minutes?"

No, that's not the case here.

J--

I've recently put together a DVD containing a 2-hour live performance and a large gallery of behind-the-scenes photos for a local theatre group. The quality is frankly way better than I had expected.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, though; the DVD spec originally called for a 130-minute running time (i.e. a typical 2-hour movie with closing credits added) on a single-layer disc, and many of the early commercial releases did exactly that. Very important in the "dark ages" of 1997, before the details of dual layer disc manufacturing had been resolved.

As the format progressed and people began acquiring larger and better TVs (not to mention PC players running at upwards of 1600x1200 resolution), demand for higher bitrates led to the result that these days pretty much every movie (regardless of length and special features) ships on a dual layer disc.

Even the 60-minutes indicated for maximum quality video is only an estimate; depending on the content and your encoder settings, it's entirely possible to fill up a DVD with a 30-minute video.

Planders: Good points, but a small correction on the last one. The maximum bitrate for the DVD-video format is around 10Mb/sec, including audio. Doing the math results in 60 minutes of video. If all one had was 30 minutes, there is no way (that I can see, anyway) to increase the bitrate further to take advantage of the disk space. Here's the quick rule: Final combined bitrate = 600 / number of minutes. In other words, if you are putting 90 minutes on the DVD, your target bitrate is 600/90=6.7Mb/sec. AC-3 audio takes .2 of that, leaving 6.5Mb/sec as your average video bitrate.

By the way, the DVDs I've made look pretty clean, but it will be very difficult to get as good as the Hollywood boys do. For one thing, they only have to deal with 24 frames per second, not the 30 over here in NTSC-land. Secondly, their source is progressive, not interlaced, which adds additional complications. Finally, the killer: their source material (35mm film) is very clean, and almost completely noise-free, while our stuff has lots of video noise. Since MPEG2 relies heavily on frame-to-frame redundancy, video noise really kills quality.

The other thing that makes the Hollywood stuff so much better is that it hasn't been through DV 25 compression. Top end mpeg encoders take their input through SDI.