Rendering and burning

usawisc wrote on 2/9/2005, 12:13 PM
I have Vegas 4 / DVD Arch 1.0 and am wondering if I am doing something wrong in the MPEG 2 creation process. When I render the project in an .avi format, and record directly to digital tape, the quality is significantly higher than when I create a dvd compliant file and subsequently burn the dvd. At this time, I do not consider the dvd quality to be acceptable and am wondering if I am missing a step. In the file set up, I choose best quality and the standard NTSC format. I have used both pent4 and athlon3400 processors, as well as dvd burners such as pioneer, i/o and hp with no discernable difference. Any suggestions as to what I can do to improce the QC process of my dvd format?

Comments

VegasVidKid wrote on 2/9/2005, 12:31 PM
MPEG2 encoding may not look too good if there is a lot of fast motion and you are using a low bitrate (under 4000). If you try to put 3 hours of fast paced action on one DVD it won't look as good as 3 hours of slow moving video (because the slow movement requires less information to indicate what has chaned between frames). At best quality, even fast action should look acceptable if you have an hour or less of footage.
SonicClang wrote on 2/9/2005, 12:32 PM
You said you're rendering your project as .avi? If you tell DVDA to burn an .avi file to DVD it will try encoding it itself, which will turn out considerbably less quality than Vegas would do it using MPEG-2. That may explain the bad quality.
jetdv wrote on 2/9/2005, 12:52 PM
Which MPEG2 preset are you using?
B.Verlik wrote on 2/9/2005, 1:01 PM
If you're using the 'default' template in DVD-A 1.0, it is very low quality. If you're using the DVD NTSC template, you can go into the settings with the 'custom' button and raise the minimum bit rate from 192,000 to 2 milliion. It will shorten your time per DVD to about 1 hour 10 minutes or so for a DVD5. It will never look as clean as an .avi as it's compressed in mpg to about 1/4 the size of an .avi. If you had Vegas 5 and DVD-A 2, you could use the 2-pass VBR encoding when making mpgs and that improves the quality quite a bit.