Got a Sony DV camcorder that when plugged directly to TV looks good. Feed video into PC via firewire and while editing the video looks okay in the small preview window. However, after converting to DVD and enlarging the video the picture looks distorted from the enlargement. What am I doing wrong? Or is the resolution not good enough to begin with for TV viewing?
Derek
Posted on
You are probably encoding the video to some other compressed format. You MUST keep the video in DV form (about 16GB per hour) during the whole proccess. The advantage of digital video is that the final result should look EXACTLY like the original. When you do your "Import" into your computer, make sure it says DV - it should NOT ask you for a resolution.
Also DVD uses a different encoding method that DV. DV compresses every frame (which is why it's so big). MPEG 2 throws out at least 75 % of the frames. The remaining frames (called "I" frames) are similar to DV. MPEG then compares the previous and next few frames with the one "I" frame and anything that is the same is thrown out. The remaining frames are called "B" frames for "Bi-directional". THEN MPEG simply guesses at some frames. These are called "P" Frames for "Prediction" frame. All this is used to save space but degrades the picture. You may have control over some of the picture controls in your DVD authoring software. Try to use 704x480 or 720x480 resolution and at least 1 Mbps. You may also be able to lower motion-estimation down to below 75%. This will cause some smearing of the picture but it will be much sharper.
Hope this helps.
Paul Bailey
Posted on
Thanks Derek. I've been experimenting with different video software (trial versions) and simply capturing the video. Guess they are doing exactly what you described. I was selecting the MPEG during the production phase. Guess this is probably one of my problems. Need to experiment with the different settings. I knew I was doing something wrong because I was sure the video was suppose to be good quality on the burn phase. Thanks again.