To those of you who are burning DVD

craftech wrote on 9/12/2002, 8:14 AM
Hi,
I still haven't gone DVD yet and as I read and gather information there is a question I can't find an answer to. I don't really know, subjectively what the visual quality of home burned DVD's looks like. I don't have access to a sample either. I use a Sony VX2000 as my primary camera and am very pleased with the results on DV tape. I am not pleased with the VHS tapes I distribute although they aren't bad. I shoot a lot of theater video and end up with endless hours of color correction processing to get a decent VHS copy for distribution. VHS copies of DV under normal lighting is of course better.
I thought about sending the master to a replication house for DVD copies, but many of you make your own.
How do they look? Would you say they are close to the DV originals, or would you say they are more like good Hi8 or SVHS? Or are they slightly better than VHS?
I realize that the longer the video, the higher the average bit rate has to be. I also realize that Dolby Digital sound adds to this, but I am not after AC3 audio. I want video which looks close to my DV originals without spending $10,000 on an encoder.

Thanks in advance,

John

Comments

jetdv wrote on 9/12/2002, 8:34 AM
IMO, my DVD's encoded using the built-in encoder in VV and turned into DVD format using DVDit PE look as good as the MiniDV original for up to 2 hours (I haven't tried longer). I am very pleased with the Main Concept encoder (after you adjust the settings for higher quality) and the DVDs created with DVDit PE (which gives you AC3 Dolby audio).
kkolbo wrote on 9/12/2002, 9:45 AM
Your VHS copies may be poor due to your copy system. If you are not running to duplication machines and running amps between you will see a big loss. Still the home DVD's that I burn are much better than any VHS. I have no complaints with the SF/MC encoding. I use two different DVD authoring apps, DVDit and DVD Workshop.

My one-off DVD's are better than any VHS movie I have purchased. The DVD comes very close to the original DVCAM footage.

K
Active wrote on 9/12/2002, 9:52 AM
we export MPEG2 DVD PAL files from vegas 3 and drop them into Sonic ReelDVD (approx $1500) this works excellently as you can encode to Dolby AC3, include menus, links, lots viewer interaction with remote, lots of programming, subtitles etc and it can also write direct to an AO3 or a DLT for duplicators.

VV3 and ReelDVD with an AO3 for about less than $3000 (i am in the UK so about £2000'ish)

try and get a demo if you can.

GLEN
vonhosen wrote on 9/12/2002, 10:59 AM
I agree that you should be able to produce with a decent encoder MPEG-2 files that are not much different from your DV source.

Replication could help with player compatability, but is only viable on a larger run of copies.
riredale wrote on 9/12/2002, 11:55 AM
Ditto the above sentiments. For any DVD less than an hour, you can run the MPEG2 encoder pretty much wide-open, and the results should be nearly identical to the source i.e. MUCH better than VHS or even SVHS.
Luxo wrote on 9/12/2002, 2:18 PM
I'm consistently amazed by the quality of the video on DVD-R compared to VHS. And don't forget about 16x9, where the quality is even sharper. Of course, new problems arise when you move to DVD, like your camera guy REALLY has to hold focus or else it shows in ways you never would have noticed on VHS.

Luxo
Paul_Holmes wrote on 9/12/2002, 8:05 PM
I AM amazed at the Main Concept encoder after using the DV500 for a year. With the DV500 I had to use constant 8000K to get quality that looked just as good as the DV camera. With Main Concept I've test-rendered a file at 8000Constant, 6000variable and 4000variable. I then created a DVD with these three files and viewed them.

The file had been processed with DVMovieMaker (which simply de-interlaces it, generally, and gives it more of a film look). I couldn't see any difference between the 8000C and the 6000Avg, and in the 4000avg the drop in quality was only noticible in a few isolated places and just barely at that. I'm no expert but I'm confident that I can use 6000variable for most of my movies, and occassionally I won't be afraid to go 4000variable if I really want 2 hours on a DVD.
zstevek wrote on 9/12/2002, 10:04 PM
I have converted many of my home movies (Digital 8) to DVD since my recent purchase of my DVD+RW burner. There are different bit rates for the MPEG-2 that you can adjust to achieve longer moves. With the average VBR setting of 4,000,000 bps a two-hour movie looks great! I currently put two 60 minute tapes on 1 dvd+R simply because the cost of the media is still high and I did not notice a significant difference in quality to make me chose a higher bit rate for my MPEG-2 rendering for my DVDs.

I guess the bottom line for me is that even a 2-hour mid range rendering on DVD beats a VHS recording in quality and certainly in easy of use. Don't forget that the DVD can be played back thousands of times while still maintaining the same quality as the first playback.
craftech wrote on 9/12/2002, 10:16 PM
Thanks to all of you for your input. You have no idea how helpful this has been.

John