Steve (or whoever will listen),

Can anyone tell me if the broadcasting industry uses de-interlacers?? How do shows like The Restaurant look so good?

It seems that no matter what I do, I lose some image quality by the time I export out of my NLE. The raw footage out of my GL2 looks beautiful on my big screen Sony WEGA, almost beautiful on an HD monitor, and outstanding on the computer monitor. But after I do the encoding and burn a DVD, it lookls like half of the horizontal lines are gone! You can actually see the lines from ten feet away.

Any suggestions? I'm using Ulead's latest MPEG encoder which I think is actually MainConcept's latest encoder. I use VBR set at a max of 8000, but my software doesn't tell me if that's dual pass or not and Ulead ain't sayin'.

Alex,
I split you post into a separate thread and placed it here in the PC forum. I think you will get better response here, since it has little to do with your GL2.

Thanks Ken. I was a little upset when I wrote that, but I've calmed down now and I can see the footage isn't as bad as I thought it was. It's still not as good as the raw DV footage. I guess my question is really this: Am I asking too much of these products? I can't help but think if I upgrade to Canopus or Avid I'll be happier with the results.

In the meantime, I am going through the list trying to find the weak link.

1. Capture card - is there a setting I'm missing?
2. Capture process - am I calilbrated correctly?
3. De-interlace or not? Before or after editing?
4. AFter editing, what are my MPEG2 encoding settings and how can they be improved?

I have a lot of work to do!

1- the capture card will not affect DV quality.
2-
3- You can de-interlace beforehand by shooting in frame mode. This will give you images that look like they are progressive and you will see about a 50% increase in vertical resolution. This is better for encoding DVDs. The disadvantage is ?lower sensitivity/low light? and motion will look worse (but more "film like"- it's still not 24fps). You should shoot with a slow shutter (1/60) so the motion doesn't look worse. Your encoder should be set to not de-interlace.

4- Some encoders are better than others. On the PC TMPGENC is good and there are some expensive ones that are better. There are also some hardware boards. A professionally done DVD will likely look better than what you can do but you should be able to get a great looking DVD (using high bitrates) except it'll take up more space. Check out dvdrhelp.com

I've never seen The Restaurant.