I am making a racing video and my night shots lost alot of quality and look red with the one place we shot at with street lights. Is this common? Im using vegas and was shooting with GL1s. I chose the best wide screen options.

Here's my check list. No matter the software or hardware I'm working on, it always manages to sort out the problem. Do one or all of these four things:

1) Check your Timeline. Make sure the mystery red is not actually in the video. You may have to recapture. Or - it's happened to the best of us - make sure you haven't accidentally dropped some filter or changed some setting that could've lead to the mystery red.

2) Check the player. Play the DVD on another player and make sure it's not a quirk of the machine or tv you happen to be playing it on.

3) Check your render settings. Try one of the presets and if one preset doesn't work: Try another one. That doesn't work, go in to the settings. If you don't know much about bit rates, kHz, cbr, vbr, I-frames... Do some research on the internet or buy a book. Understanding the basics of the miracle that is mpeg encoding will save you a lot of grief in future.

4) Check your burning speed. Try burning a DVD at the slowest speed possible.

good luck

Tony:

Properly done, a DVD should look virtually identical to the DV video. MPEG2 has carefully taken out redundant data while leaving the important data.

If your scene is reddish, did you shoot with Daylight white balance? If so, your street light scenes will be reddish/yellowish.

If your MPEG2 encoding bitrate is too low, you will get a lot of "mosquito noise" around edges of objects, or a very blocky appearance, especially where there is a lot of motion happening in the scene.

As for burning, you can usually safely burn at the highest rated speed of the disk. You can verify this for yourself by download the free utility "Nero CD/DVD speed" and use it to check the quality of the burned disk.

As for burning, you can usually safely burn at the highest rated speed of the disk. You can verify this for yourself by download the free utility "Nero CD/DVD speed" and use it to check the quality of the burned disk.

I have found lots of problems with burning at anything over 2x. New DVD players can cope, but the vast majority of component DVD players out there cannot.

jason

Jason:

Could it be something else besides burn speed? I have burned and distributed literally thousands of DVD-R and DVD+R DL disks over the past 5 years with no problems. All were burned with the highest rated speed for the disk.

I have found that the only consistently reliable DVD-R DVD5 medium out there is the one from Taiyo Yuden. Similarly, the only consistently reliable DVD+R DL DVD9 medium is the Verbatim. Both disks burn beautifully at 8x on my NEC 3550A burners (10 minutes for the DVD5, 20 minutes for the DVD9).

As mentioned before, if one does a post-burn check with the Nero CD/DVD Speed utility, it will be very obvious whether a player might have issues. For example, I have found that the error rate is significantly higher in the outer portion of a DVD-5 disk if it is burned at 12x rather than at 8x. Even so, most DVD players will be able to handle it. Nonetheless, I burn at 8x just for the extra margin of reliability.

Incidentally, I have found that adhesive labels will increase the error rate somewhat. Even so, I have seen that a TY disk with a label still has a lower error rate than a bare Ritek disk. Now that one can get beautiful glossy inkjet-printable DVD-R blanks, I don't use labels at all any more.

I'll have to look into that utility. I haven't usually done a "verify" after burning with DVDA.

But then again, may be that is my problem. All my burns are done through DVDA and have had band problems with any burn over 2x, no matter what media is used.

jason

Jason, I've never used DVD-A to burn a disk. In fact, I don't use DVD-A at all, though I understand it's a decent authoring tool.

Maybe you could try using a different burn tool such as Nero. I use the simpler version, called Nero Express, and it has been very stable and reliable for me. For that matter, I also use Nero Cover Designer to do the layouts of my disk art.

For what it's worth, I've have terrible luck trying to use Nero with Double-Layer DVD+R disks. Apparently this is a common issue. I instead use CopyToDVD for all my DL needs, and it, too, is stable and reliable.

I use DVD-A and burn to DVD-R TDK media at 16x and have never had a problem. I'm not sure what could be causing this for you.