exporting to DVD

[Amr El Maghraby]

hi guys i have a question, we've been trying to export our showreel to DVD from Scratch but my problem is i don't want to burn it because I lose massive amount of quality but i don't know what to do should i get a DVD recorder, I need to get this DVD with its full quality without losing anything as much as i can so whats the steps to do so? a dvd recorder or is there another way waiting for your reply

thanks

[John Tissavary]

You're always going to lose when encoding for DVD - the mpeg-2 codec is very lossy, but there's no way around it. The best you can do is choose your encoding values carefully.

I use Procoder 3 for my DVD transcodes, it works quite well. I go for a multi-pass, variable bitrate encoding with maximum bitrate at 8000kbps, average at 6000kbps, and minimum at 0. Quality is usually quite good.


regards

JT

[jimhare]

A DVD Recorder will not give you good results. In fact, they encode at half size!

Your best bet would be to master your showreel to tape and bring it to a facility with a Sonic Solutions SD-2000. Hollywood quality hardware encoder.

If this is cost prohibitive, then Compressor/Procoder/BitVice etc. may be your best bet.

[Michael Romano]

Jim is right. Deck encoders are not a good idea. There is plenty of material available around the internet regarding the best compression practices and softwares. FCS comes with a Compressor manual that will start you in the right direction if nothing else. Remember, DVD is still going to be a lower resolution that what you're seeing on the screen in Scratch, no matter how good the encode.

[Dan Hudgins]

If you can show your DVD on a computer rather than a DVD player, you can burn an uncompressed AVI file onto a DATA DVD, that can be sent to people and looks MUCH better than a MPEG-2 type DVD.

Its always sad for me to see the AVI 720x480 play uncompressed on the computer screen, then convert that to MPEG-2 for making a standard DVD, the quality loss is very obvious.

Depending on how long your reel is you can also save it as a 1280x720 uncompressed AVI on a DVD-R disk for play on a computer, that is much better than a MPEG-2 DVD for a DVD player, but not all computers are fast enough to play 1280x720 uncompressed.

To get an uncompressed AVI with out extra compression artifacts you need to edit uncompressed at 4K then resample using all the pixels down to the size for the AVI. If you are not going to make an MPEG-2 then you can dither the BMP frames to make the AVI with in VirtualDUB (tm), if you are going to make a MPEG-2 the extra noise can use bandwidth, but on the uncompressed AVI dithering gives you extra tonal range and no (or at least less) banding on 8bit (24bpp) video displays.

[Gabriele Turchi]

You're always going to lose when encoding for DVD - the mpeg-2 codec is very lossy, but there's no way around it. The best you can do is choose your encoding values carefully.

I use Procoder 3 for my DVD transcodes, it works quite well. I go for a multi-pass, variable bitrate encoding with maximum bitrate at 8000kbps, average at 6000kbps, and minimum at 0. Quality is usually quite good.


regards

JT

john how is procoder in terms of scaling..?or you scale it to SD first?

thanks

g

[John Tissavary]

I use After Effects for scaling to SD. It's slower than Scratch, but I've never seen any jaggies artifacts from AE, and I have had that (rarely) happen in Scratch.

cheers,

JT