DVD resolution issues

[Vince Sweeney]

Ok so we are authoring some 1080p Prores files for BluRay and DVD. My eyes have adjusted to HD these days so DVD's look fuzzy to me now but there is something else going on when it comes to the resolution between a store bought DVD and one coming from DVD Studio Pro. The bit rate seems to have nothing to do with what I'm talking about as I've played with that endlessly. I can pretty easily see jaggies/steps on the DVD when viewed on a 46" Plasma, playing out of an up-rezzing BluRay player. The store bought DVDs seem to have very little and some almost look like 720p. Can anyone help me to understand why? Have a suggestion for a better DVD master solution in the LA area?

[Jaakko Rinne]

How are you doing the downscale? When going from 1080p to SD quite a few programs produce too sharp results that end up with jaggies and flickering. You might want to try a different downscaler/algorithm or manually adding a little blur before the downscale.

[Vince Sweeney]

Im not sure what you mean. I don't see any settings like that and I doubt that making the video more blurry is a good idea. I'm using the ever popular Studio Pro that came with Final Cut.

[Roy Pearson]

Vince, try using Compressor to encode the DVD. You can use one of the DVD presets, but make sure to turn on frame controls and set the resize filter to 'best' or 'better'. You may want to tweak some other settings too, but that should solve the jaggies problem.

[Jaakko Rinne]

Im not sure what you mean. I don't see any settings like that and I doubt that making the video more blurry is a good idea. I'm using the ever popular Studio Pro that came with Final Cut.

You're just dropping your 1080p master into DVD Studio Pro? If you want good quality you need to spend some time to customize how you do the downscale and encode of your material. Like Roy suggested, try going through Compressor.

Pre-blurring before the downscale will not result in a blurry image, but it will reduce the chance of seeing jaggies. A proper downscaler does just that - it multisamples the image. But you can help the downscaler along by adding a little blur. If your downscale is too sharp it will introduce jaggies and flicker.

[Greg Barley]

Compressor and Adobe Media Encoder are both pretty good at encoding, but honestly both are terrible at scaling. I use AME for producing DVD's when I need 'good' quality, but if you want 'great' quality, then you have to do the scaling using different tools. And since I can't afford Hollywood-quality scaling software, I use a workflow that is free, but also a bit complicated (at least until you do it once or twice). I wouldn't use this workflow if you aren't at least a little computer/tech savvy, though...

Here are two slighly different takes on the higher quality scaling workflow I use:

http://www.precomposed.com/blog/2009...-best-methods/

http://bellunevideo.com/tutdetail.php?tutid=12

Yes, yes, I know, it is NOT easy... requires a few different programs, etc. BUT... it will produce amazing results! If you want great looking DVD's in all their SD glory, this is the only route I've found so far...

[Jaakko Rinne]

Here's a customizable scaling plug-in for After Effects: https://sites.google.com/site/katisv...bspline-scaler

Not that good for upscales, but brilliant for downscales.

[Vince Sweeney]

Thanks for the help guys. I will start down this path of endless trial and error. You'd think someone would just build a nice, simple DVD burning program. I'd buy it (again).

[Eric Santiago]

We use BitVice and Adobe Media Encoder CS 5.5 for DVD prep files.

[Bob Gundu]

DVD Studio Pro is great but it's not the best solution for creating the mpeg files. Using Compressor will give you much better results.