On Wed, 09 Apr 2003 15:56:47 GMT, "SimMike-" <simmike@attbi.com> wrote:

>So far, I am pretty disappointed when outputting edited DV video to DVD using

>Sonic MyDVD. At the "highest" quality setting, I can fit about 1 hour of video

>on the DVD, which is good enough, but the quality isn't very good. If you just

>watch the movie and don't use pause or still frame, it looks OK, better than VHS

>by far, but not as good as the original DV. During still frame or slow motion,

>there are pretty bad MPEG artifacts, especially during fast moving scenes, which

>is to be expected. Maybe the DVD encoder in Sonic MyDVD isn't that great, but I

>have tried using Ulead MSP 6.5 MPG encoder and the results were about the same.

Then don't pause or use slow-motion...;-) The key is: "it

looks OK, better than VHS by far". DVDs are more highly

compressed than DV, lower in resolution, not compressed

"frame-by-frame", and there is compression of an already

compressed format - it is a wonder that it looks any good

at all... BTW, with MyDVD and the Ulead software, I find

that the quality is surprisingly close to the original

(high-quality) footage UNLESS there is a lot of very

fine detail, in motion (tough to compress very well...).

>I know that you can put high quality video on DVD, because just look at every

>movie you see on DVD.

Remember how good commercial movie VHS tapes looked, and

how bad ours look...? Movies start with a LOT more info,

and are compressed by people who know how to get the

very best out of a medium, and with this, even 240-line

limited VHS copies look good. Your DVDs should look good,

with little loss most of the time compared with the

originals, but they will not look as good as commercial

productions...

>How can I get the highest quality output from my DV video

>to DVD? Given how good regular DVD movies look, there must be a way to get my DV

>video to look just as good when output to DVD. Using DVD2One, I can compress

>three hour movies to one DVD-R and the results look pretty darn good, so I know

>lots more than 1 hour will fit on DVD-R.

Commercial DVDs have twice the storage capacity to start.

For the rest, see above, and the responses in the thread

in rec.video.production, "COMPARING Various MPEG2

Encoders...".