Quality/Resolution Problems - RESOLVED

fullcontactmotorsports wrote on 11/25/2006, 3:43 PM
I am using Vegas 6.0 and DVD Architect 3.0. My camera is a Sony DCR HC36. I must have a setting wrong somewhere. The picture is grainy on the computer screen and on the TV once I burn a DVD. Can anyone tell me what settings I should be using? I want a clear picture but I would also like to fit 45-60 minutes of video on one disc.
The project properties are as follows: Template = NTSC DV, Width = 720, Height = 480, Field order = lower field first, Pixel aspect ratio = 0.9091 (NTSC DV), Frame rate = 29.970 (NTSC), Full-resolution rendering quality = Good, Deinterlace method = blend fields.
PLEASE HELP!!! I finally figured out how to use the software to make the menus work, etc... now I'm having these quality issues! ARRRGHHH!!
THANKS!!
Julie

Comments

bStro wrote on 11/25/2006, 6:46 PM
When you say the picture is grainy on the computer, are you referring to the original footage you captured off the camera, an AVI that you rendered, or an MPEG2 that you rendered, or...?

It's not really clear from your message at what point the quality goes wrong (in your opinion). If it's "poor" straight from the camera, then you'd want to start by seeing what can be done to improve the original recording. (In most cases, better lighting is the first step.) Actually, according to this review I found, grainy footage is the norm for that camera, so you might have your work cut out for you. :/

The project / render settings you list sound fine, so no need to change anything there. And putting 45 to 60 minutes on a DVD is no problem; you can fit that on a disc just fine using a relatively high bitrate.

Rob
fullcontactmotorsports wrote on 11/27/2006, 7:54 AM
I captured the video directly from the camera via firewire. I'm not sure of the format they are in when I do that. I had burned discs from the same footage a few months ago and the quality was as clear as if I were playing it directly from the original tape from the camera. I had made some clips for the internet since and thought I had screwed up some default setting in the program. It looks like I should have stuck with my old analog camera and garbage TDK Indicapture :(
fullcontactmotorsports wrote on 11/28/2006, 7:01 PM
I am starting with an .avi in Vegas Movie Studio, I do the editing (video cropping and audio) and click on Make movie. I use the .vf file that I just created in Architect to make a menu based DVD....Will any of this affect quality?
fullcontactmotorsports wrote on 11/30/2006, 9:31 AM
Just in case someone on here has a similar problem, I found my answer at another forum from someone who had the same issue. This is what was suggested:

"You say it looks bad when viewed on a computer DVD player; have you tyried a stand alone DVD player and TV? A SD DVD has a res of 720x576. A computer screen has a res of at least 1024x768 and most likely much higher. So SD DVD's can often look soft, fuzzy and pixelated on computer LCD's because the small SD res is being artifically inflated to meet the rest of the monitor, especially if you try to watch them full screen. Try on a TV and see how it looks.

In terms of Bitrate you never want to push it to max. Whilst the DVD Standard allows for a bitrate of 9.8mbps there's no DVD player on earth that can keep this up and DVD players vary widely. So I almost never use a bitrate of more than 6.8mbps to ensure it can be played on any DVD player.

Other than that you could try and render a PAL DV avi file from vegas and let DVDA take care of the Mpeg2 compression. Whilst its true you have more control over Mpeg2 encoding from vegas than DVDA you can also inadvertedly double compress. If you takle a a amster PAL DV avi file to DVDA and let it do the encode you ensure there's only one Mpeg2 pass."

Someone else had also indicated that Architect 2.0 had a bug that caused this, so I also downloaded 3.0C as well as rendering a PAL DV avi file in Vegas then letting Architect do it's thing...