Stills, High Def & rendering to MPeg2, Spot

JohnS wrote on 3/21/2004, 11:21 PM
If I render a bunch of higher res stills (using pan & scan) to Main Concepts' stock MPEG2 HD 1080-30p or HD 720-30p in Vegas, will I get any better quality of video output on my DVD when I burn it utilizing DVD Architect, than when I use the regular old default 720x480 setting on the "best" template while rendering? (the same question applies to video shot using a high-res video camera as well)

Needless to say, I'm not totally impressed with the quality that I'm getting now by using the default setting and am trying to improve it. It's not bad, but I'm disappointed that my 300 dpi and 450 dpi stills aren't crystal clear on my high-def TV. I also realize that DVD players pump out half the resolution of high def, however, the image quality that I'm getting doesn't come near that of a commercial DVD.

Note to Spot: Yeah, I put your name in the title because I loved your book and value your input.

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 3/22/2004, 5:23 AM
I usually scan my slides and pictures at 1200 dpi and they wind up with
about between 1.5 to 5 megs per picture. On DVD they come out very clear and sharp but still with what looks like some "film grain". What your asking for isn't available yet unless you use the Cineform codec and print to D-vhs tape in HDV streams. Then you will crap your pants at the quality. When the new" Blue ray" DVD stuff comes out I assume then that you will be able to burn HDV to disc straight from Vegas, maybe. I don't know if rendering in 720p and then rendering again to 720 x 480 (DVD NTSC) will gain anything.

JJK
Spot|DSE wrote on 3/22/2004, 7:25 AM
You can do better with the new MainConcept codec, but you can't use it in Vegas at this time...The Cinemacraft encoder is slightly better, but honestly, I've not run high def experiments with stills and the MPEG encode. What I've seen from the Sony boys is pretty awesome, I've seen a series of tga files at HD....wish I had a better answer for you.
SonyEPM wrote on 3/22/2004, 11:39 AM
"If I render a bunch of higher res stills (using pan & scan) to Main Concepts' stock MPEG2 HD 1080-30p or HD 720-30p in Vegas, will I get any better quality of video output on my DVD when I burn it utilizing DVD Architect"

No- you'll have a standard def DVD at the end of the day and uprezing first will not help.
Bill Ravens wrote on 3/22/2004, 12:24 PM
I beleive the DVD cosortium is about to come out with an HD spec for DVD disks. You can expect your problem to get MUCH better after this HD spec is adopted by DVD burner software makers
theigloo wrote on 3/22/2004, 3:19 PM

I've had the same problem you've had. For some reason, going from stills to MPG-2 doesn't work very well.

To get better results, "flatten" your project. In other words, render your stills to a new track that is a NTSC DV .avi. Make sure you have all settings at best.

You will notice the quality is much better.

Then render that to MPG-2 for DVDA.