Me thinks the problem has nothing to do with the process of turning it into a DVD.
When you enlarge anything to 3 x 4 metres the viewing angle is generally greater i.e. the image is magnified. Every defect becomes bigger and hence more noticable. If you were to take the S8 film and project it onto the same sized screen does it look any better; that is where you have to start from.
Of course it can only go downhill from that point, large blobs of grain that shift between every frame pose a big problem for the mpeg encoder, so getting the cleanest possible image before encoding will help no end.
On top of that any standard def DVD isn't going to look too great on a big screen. Video seems to survive better than even 35mm sourced material, so S8 is pushing the curve.

What frame rate was the S8 shot at is another issue, hopefully 25fps as doing any interpolation isn't going to help either.

I'd start by looking for a good grain reduction tool and/or see if you can get a transfer on a telecine that can reduce the grain, I think there's some pretty neat optical tricks that can be done to help a bit.

Another small thing, mask the edge of the frame, that dirty gate makes it look authentic but isn't really helping the encoding either.

When it comes to encoding, 8Mbit/sec CBR is about as good as it gets, you might just be able to push the bitrate to 9Mbit/sec without the DVD player loosing the plot but I doubt it's going to help a real lot, nowhere near as much as grain reduction will.

Do you have to deliver this on SD DVD is the other question?

Thanks a lot for the good advice!

Chienworks, I'll try those settings you suggested!

Farrs, I usually screen my Super 8 stuff from miniDV and the difference to screening from DVD is huge. Projections are always bad but with super 8 Its really difficult to achieve good quality. I've done a lot of DVD screenings from different source materials and 16mm is a piece of cake but with Super 8 the troubles start. And yes unfortunately for the festival Im making this screening copy they require DVD as source. But hopefully when I add the blur and/or push the bitrate it will help a bit.

Thank you so much again for the help!

Sami

S8 shouldn't be THAT bad, it's been blown up to 35mm and not looked too shabby but it probably depends on the stock and processing. The latest Kodak stuff which is just cut from 35mm should be very good with good processing. If you're shooting this yourself I'd also look into Pro8.

Also look for post here from John Meyer such as this one:
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=508709

Thanks for the tips! Ill look into those.

I think my problem is mainly the fact that my standards are too high :)

Sami

I just read this whole thread, and then went back and looked at the original post. It is not clear from that post what sort of degradation you are seeing. You need to describe the differences from how the original Super8 film looks when projected onto a screen, to how the DVD from that Super8 film looks when projected at the same size, onto the same screen.

I would expect some degradation because Super8 film has more resolution than SD video (see my old post here: Super 8mm Film Resolution).

Next, you do not say what technology was used to transfer your film to video, and in what form this video was stored prior to bringing into Vegas. Your YouTube clip looks as though the technology used was quite professional, but there still might be problems there. What you really should do is take the video from the transfer (I assume it is on tape) and project it, if you can. Compare that to the DVD, rather than comparing the Super8 to the DVD. That way, you can tell if the problem is truly in the MPEG-2 encoding process, or whether most of the quality was lost when transferring from Super8 to video. My guess is that the MPEG-2 encoding is adding very little degradation to the results, assuming you are doing it correctly.

This brings me to a large set of questions:

1. What MPEG-2 settings are you using? It is extremely important when doing MPEG-2 encoding from film that you use the correct settings.

2. Is your media on the Vegas timeline set for progressive? The media flag can easily get set to interlaced, depending on the software used in the film transfer process.

3. Do you have "Smart Resample" enabled for the media in your project, or do you have that Disabled? I would recommend disabling it if you want to have the normal film pulldown applied. Again, this will depend on whether pulldown was already applied during the film transfer process and whether that pulldown was applied correctly. Normally, those of you in PAL land don't worry about pulldown, but if this is 18 fps Super8, then you are going to have to deal with field duplication, and it better be done right or you're going to end up with all sorts of softness.

4. Do you have field interpolation turned off? If everything is set to progressive (source media and rendering), then this shouldn't matter, but I ran into something several months ago that causes me to believe that this should be disabled in both the project and render settings.

Finally, just this morning I discovered something that may or may not be a bug in 7.0d (I reported it to tech support, so we'll see), but I found that with 23.976 source material that when I used VBR MPEG-2 encoding, I was only getting about 2/3 of the average bitrate (I verified this with a tool that reads the ENTIRE file and then reports the average bitrate). My solution was to render using the CBR (constant bitrate) setting. I would therefore recommend this to you.

Probably more information than you want, but I have done lots of encoding from Super8 and 16mm film (captured using both Workprinter, and my own film transfer device) and have learned a lot. Bob ("farss"), however, is WAY ahead of me and knows infinitely more, so I defer to anything he has to say on this subject. I'm just a self-educated amateur; He's the pro.

One of my customers reports that using Neat Video for Vegas was helpful in cleaning up the graininess in 8mm transfers.

Harold, can you comment further?

RalphM

I would be very cautious about trying to "clean up" the grain in 8mm film. First of all, grain is part of the look. Second of all, as someone who has done a LOT of noise reduction work, you will find that a "little" noise reduction will not eliminate the grain, but will get you into a "no man's land" where some of the noise/grain is reduced and some is not. If you turn up the noise reduction to the point where the grain disappears, you end up with very nasty artifacts. The problem, simply put, is that there is no such thing as "a little grain reduction." What does that mean? Eliminate every other grain dot? Merge together grains only below a certain size?

In a still photo, you can do this and get pleasing results, but when you do it on moving pictures, and each new frame has the grain reduced in a slightly different way than the previous frame, the results can look quite bad.

Of course, like anything, some people like the result, so what the heck do I know ...

I think a much bigger question is why does this 8mm have so much grain in the first place?

Is it really grain even?

I'd also suspect that scanning the film at more than SD res and then doing grain reduction might help. And to state the obvious having the film clean and free of scratches (wet gate if needed) will help.

I'm still curious also as to how this 8mm was transfered. It's obviously hard to tell from a compressed copy but it looks like there's some frame interpolation going on.

Bob.

I love Neat Video. My super8 film had grain because of film speed used and amount of light when filmed. It is really nice to use on film with a little grain (easy fix) and can help on really bad stuff. Lots of grain drives me nuts. I have used it at least a dozen times. It does suck down computer power. Very long renders.

Modern film stock, modern transfer, etc. you probably don't need a lot of heavy correcting. John Meyer-type "finesse" would be in order if there were problems.

Here is more discussion of the Neat Video plugin that worked very well with my friend's 50 year old hand held film/15 year old transfer (look toward bottom of thread for sample video link). Quick test with robust settings, which can be turned down for more subtle tweaks.

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=515365