I hope someone here can point me in the right direction. I have a urgent job to get out and I am having trouble with the quality of the final dvd. It's an 11 disc dvd set and all dvd's came out great, except for one. When I play the final dvd on pc or desktop dvd player, I get horrible jagged edges and stuttering whenever there is motion (panning).

My client used a Panasonic GS500 (pal) camcorder to film and it is in 16x9. I am editing in Vegas and using dvda for the final dvd layout and burn. The final video needs to be in 4x3

My vegas project settings are:

Template: Pal dv widescreen (720x576, 25fps) (Have tried Pal dv -4x3 also without success)
Field order: Lower field first
Rendering quality: Best
Motion blur type: Gaussian
Deinterlace method: Interpolate fields

My rendering settings are:

Save as: MainConcept MPEG2 (for dvda)
Constant bitrate: 7,500.000 (Have tried Variable bitrate of 8,500,000/8,000,000/4,200,000 also)

While editing, everything looks great, but final result looks terrible.Looking forward to hearing from you. thanking you in advance.

Sounds (to me) like you have an interlaced issue (maybe the field order got swapped by accident on that Vegas project or DVD's settings somewhere?). I call it Venetian Blind effect and you will see sawtooth like edges to hard upright lines especially when panning. Sometimes you can accidentally swap the field order over when cropping in with Vegas, depending on whether or not your top line of the crop is an odd or even line etc. This is one reason why I only ever shoot and edit in progressive now, it gets rid of all the de-interlacing time and potential problems that can occur.

Do a quick search in this forum using the word interlaced and you should pull up lots of helpful threads.

Hope this nails it and good luck!

Thanks for your reply Andy. I checked all the settings in Vegas and DVDA and it is the same as all the others that are working perfectly.

The source footage is 16x9 and the final dvd is in 4x3 (edited on a 4x3 timeline). I went into Vegas and went to cropping and panning and selected "Match Output Aspect" and the jagged edges and stuttery went away. Two things happened though: the 2 black bars at the top and bottom of the screen has disappeared and a slight zoom was applied. But the funny thing is, the quality is actually still good.

This is more of a band aid solution rather than finding the root of the problem, but the client might just accept it if all else fails.

Glad it's sorted. Maybe one of the Vegas gurus can tell you what was really happening...