Best quality to dvd from HDV with the HD100 at DVinfo.net

Chris Schwein · January 3rd, 2007, 10:50 PM

Hey guys,

I'm sending this short film to different festivals on standard dvds. The original footage was shot in HDV 24P on the HD100, edited natively in Final Cut Pro and now I'm exporting it for duplication in DVD Studio Pro. I'm not exceptionally happy with the kind of compression I'm seeing in darker shots and just the overall detail. I've done MPEG 2, and even Uncompressed quicktime and let Studio Pro do the encoding when burning the dvds.

Do you guys know for sure what the exact settings are to get the highest quality for dvd's with Apple's tools?

Jonathan Nelson · January 4th, 2007, 01:12 AM

I know how you feel, I am not happy with the compression either.

I did what a lot of people recommended which is capture hdv 24p, edit hdv 24p, export uncompressed, and send to dvd studio. I must have done something wrong because the footage looked terrible using this method. I know I did something wrong :)

The process I used next was simply exporting from the hdv 24p timeline using compressor's DVD best quality 90 minutes 16:9 setting.

That created the best looking dvd so far but I am not impressed at all with the way it looks on my production monitors.

I did notice a few workflows that mentioned not to export from the timeline.

I tried other methods but none of them stacked up to the compessor's mpeg2 6.2, dual pass setting.

IMO, its still crappy compression but I haven't found a better method yet. I hope someone out there could enlighten us with a workflow that produces better results.

Bankim Jain · January 4th, 2007, 02:39 AM

Just a by chance view.

I dont own a JVC HDV stuff, hope I would few HDV200s, after I am able to seel off my DSR450s.

What if we do all the edits of HDV 24p in HDV mode then dump all the footage to tape then play the tape & use the players COMPOSITE type output to play out a DV type footage into the DVD making s/w ... try it if it seems feaseable ... Pl upade on any of your views on the same. Pardon me for my ignmorance to the subject's practicality !!!

Justin Ferar · January 4th, 2007, 02:44 AM

I was never happy with Compressor for DV work. I switched to Bitvice and never looked back. I did a zillion tests and don't really understand why anyone would use Compressor, except for speed.

http://www.innobits.com/

That said- I haven't finished any projects in HD yet but I think it's safe to assume that the results will still beat the pants off Compressor.

There is a FCP forum at the site and the programmers actually respond to your questions. Pretty cool.

Best of luck!

Jack Walker · January 4th, 2007, 02:55 AM

I don't use FCP. However, I can verify that there can be a huge difference in quality for different encoders.

The obvious issues are to keep the edited video as clean as possible with as little contamination by multi-generation deteriorations, etc. -- whether using an intermediary codec or not.

Then a quality encoder needs to be used to go from the HDV to an mpeg2 version for the DVD.

I don't know which one for the Mac, but a standalone encoder is going to be the one that will give the best results.

Antony Michael Wilson · January 4th, 2007, 04:25 AM

At the facility where I used to work here in London, we ran a series of proper tests on many software encoders with comparable settings on a variety of footage and viewed on everything from old CRT composite TV sets to broadcast grade 1 monitors - also on SDI-based scopes. The purpose was to compare image quality on MPEG2 encodes for DVD compared to those created on our Sonic Scenarist and older DVD Creator/Encoder hardware systems (serious bucks).

In summary only, our findings were that Apple's Compressor produced by far the worst results across the board. Bitvice was a big improvement for the Mac. Squeeze was slightly weaker than Bitvice. Other PC-based software encoders performed much better but the real champion was Canopus Procoder, which performed best with all source footage at any bitrate. The results from Procoder were certainly weaker than those from our - very expensive - hardware encoders, especially on graphics material with a lot of subtle shading, but you'd need a fantastic monitor and a good eye to see the difference. At the other end, Compressor's images were totally unsatisfactory in every regard, although I'm pretty sure many people viewing on domestic equipment would still not notice this unless they saw the images up against a comparable encode from Procoder.

Btw, we use Macs and PCs on a daily basis for various post production tasks and have no real bias either way. Our tests were carried out by DVD authoring specialists together with broadcast engineers taking the time and effort to compare in a responsible and scientific way. All tests were carried out from 625/50 source material (film TK'd to DigiBeta; Digibeta-acquired video; DVCAM-acquired video from DSR570P; DVCAM-acquired material from PD150 and VHS archive viewing copies) encoded as PAL-compatible streams.

Also, if you want to use a domestic DVD recorder for speed - do NOT use the composite output!!! This is the worst possible connection to use! Use SDI if you're one of the lucky people with a SDI-equipped DVD recorder or - more likely - component analogue YUV if you have that option, otherwise S-Video and then composite only if image quality is of no importance. If you're getting better image results via composite to a DVD recorder than with encoding software from a decent quality digital source image, then there is something seriously wrong with your encoding software and/or method!

Antony Michael Wilson · January 4th, 2007, 08:29 AM

I forgot to mention that Procoder Express is incredibly cheap, so if anyone has access to a PC and wants to create excellent quality MPEG2 encodes for DVD on a budget then it's well worth a look.

Bill Ravens · January 4th, 2007, 08:44 AM

I'm not gonna beat my drum too loudly..but, really.....
vegas7 and cineform's connectHD works like a dream for me.
I burn out to DVD with DVD Architect, CBR=9800, and get beautiful results.
No fuss, no muss. In fact, m2T files play so well on my PC that I am archiving everything in m2T. If more people had
AVER media Players, I'd burn DVD's in m2t format. non compliant, but what the hell.

Mark Silva · January 4th, 2007, 11:28 AM

I have been a part-time compressionist at my facility for the last five years.

I have found compressor to not be that good as well.
Its satisfactory but not great.

I have to wonder though, are all of you using the presets or are you actually going in and tweaking the settings?

Because most of those presets are awful.

If your resizing HD to SD and you don't make sure the resizing section is set to best quality, you'll get a horrible result.

As far as best encoders for the money (in software)
I have to agree that procoder is probably the best with cinema craft and tsunami following closely.

William Hohauser · January 4th, 2007, 11:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris Schwein

Hey guys,

I'm sending this short film to different festivals on standard dvds. The original footage was shot in HDV 24P on the HD100, edited natively in Final Cut Pro and now I'm exporting it for duplication in DVD Studio Pro. I'm not exceptionally happy with the kind of compression I'm seeing in darker shots and just the overall detail. I've done MPEG 2, and even Uncompressed quicktime and let Studio Pro do the encoding when burning the dvds.

Do you guys know for sure what the exact settings are to get the highest quality for dvd's with Apple's tools?

I'm assuming that you are exporting to SD not HD. First the detail will be reduced, that is unavoidable. I have done a number of 30p HDV projects and have been overall satisfied with the output of Compressor. These are projects that have been later projected off the DVD and they looked fine. While there are definitely better MPEG2 software programs out there (PC or Mac) with better visual results, I thnk that a little adjusting of the compression setting within Compressor or DVD Studio Pro might help. The stock settings are very broad and not ideal for short form projects. Most of the settings assume that you will be cramming 90 minutes or more of video onto a disc. Don't let the max bitrate top 8Mbps and as long as the total amount of video on the DVD is less then an hour, you should be fine.

You also might experiment with exporting a SD DV file from your HDV edit and then compressing that for MPEG2.

Steve Benner · January 4th, 2007, 12:24 PM

I usually export a Quicktime Reference from FCP and then import it into compressor and use the 16:9 Best Quality Setting. I have loved the results. I also have downconverted into Uncompressed SD inside of FCP before going into ccompressor, although the results are similar.

Jack Walker · January 4th, 2007, 01:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Antony Michael Wilson

I forgot to mention that Procoder Express is incredibly cheap, so if anyone has access to a PC and wants to create excellent quality MPEG2 encodes for DVD on a budget then it's well worth a look.

I, also, have found Procoder 2 to give excellent results.

A couple of years back I had a two-hour video of dancing that I wanted on a single DVD. I encoded it with the encoder built-into Pinnacle Liquid Edition 5.5. The picture was terrible. Movement was blocky and smeary throughout when compared to the original DV tape.

I read a bunch of reviews of the current (then) encoders. One lengthy reviewer had chosen Procoder for two-hour videos on water that had to be done in both NTSC and PAL. Procoder gave the best results on the water at low bit-rates.

Many encoders can give respectable results at high bit-rates, but as the rate lowers, the differences show up. I don't know this for sure, but I have a feeling that encoding HDV mpeg to mpeg for dvd also requires a better encoder, just as lowering the bitrate does.

Joe Bowey · January 4th, 2007, 03:18 PM

So is shooting in HDV and being compressed still better going to Dvd than just shooting in SD?
Also Bll Raven, I use Vegas 4 and love it. I just upgraded to 7 but have not installed it because waiting to build a new system so what are you using?

Brian Luce · January 4th, 2007, 03:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bill Ravens

I'm not gonna beat my drum too loudly..but, really.....
vegas7 and cineform's connectHD works like a dream for me.
I burn out to DVD with DVD Architect, CBR=9800, and get beautiful results.
No fuss, no muss. In fact, m2T files play so well on my PC that I am archiving everything in m2T. If more people had
AVER media Players, I'd burn DVD's in m2t format. non compliant, but what the hell.

Hi, I use vegas 6...Can you give a few specifics on how you do it?

Shaun Wilson · January 4th, 2007, 04:39 PM

Just cos this thread's become a bit more general than FCP...

I export QT ref of a mixdown from Avid (DV50 if I'm doing SD, still playing with the best HD option but at the moment just highest bitrate DNxHD) and get TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0 to encode my MPEG2's. Always been quite happy with the results, even lower bit rate CBR's come out reasonable given the amount of compression going on. Very cheap and since version 4.0 you can convert almost anything to almost anything (even has a built in DivX 6 encoder).

Would be interested to know how well it stacks up against others tho. Mark, when you say Tsunami I assume you mean the TMPGEnc one? (Must they keep changing their name for different markets?)

January 3rd, 2007, 10:50 PM	#1
Chris Schwein New Boot Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: Orlando, FL Posts: 14	Best quality to dvd from HDV with the HD100 Hey guys, I'm sending this short film to different festivals on standard dvds. The original footage was shot in HDV 24P on the HD100, edited natively in Final Cut Pro and now I'm exporting it for duplication in DVD Studio Pro. I'm not exceptionally happy with the kind of compression I'm seeing in darker shots and just the overall detail. I've done MPEG 2, and even Uncompressed quicktime and let Studio Pro do the encoding when burning the dvds. Do you guys know for sure what the exact settings are to get the highest quality for dvd's with Apple's tools?

January 4th, 2007, 02:39 AM	#3
Bankim Jain Major Player Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: USA Posts: 219	Just a by chance view. I dont own a JVC HDV stuff, hope I would few HDV200s, after I am able to seel off my DSR450s. What if we do all the edits of HDV 24p in HDV mode then dump all the footage to tape then play the tape & use the players COMPOSITE type output to play out a DV type footage into the DVD making s/w ... try it if it seems feaseable ... Pl upade on any of your views on the same. Pardon me for my ignmorance to the subject's practicality !!! __________________ Cheers !

January 4th, 2007, 04:25 AM	#6
Antony Michael Wilson Major Player Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: London, UK Posts: 343	At the facility where I used to work here in London, we ran a series of proper tests on many software encoders with comparable settings on a variety of footage and viewed on everything from old CRT composite TV sets to broadcast grade 1 monitors - also on SDI-based scopes. The purpose was to compare image quality on MPEG2 encodes for DVD compared to those created on our Sonic Scenarist and older DVD Creator/Encoder hardware systems (serious bucks). In summary only, our findings were that Apple's Compressor produced by far the worst results across the board. Bitvice was a big improvement for the Mac. Squeeze was slightly weaker than Bitvice. Other PC-based software encoders performed much better but the real champion was Canopus Procoder, which performed best with all source footage at any bitrate. The results from Procoder were certainly weaker than those from our - very expensive - hardware encoders, especially on graphics material with a lot of subtle shading, but you'd need a fantastic monitor and a good eye to see the difference. At the other end, Compressor's images were totally unsatisfactory in every regard, although I'm pretty sure many people viewing on domestic equipment would still not notice this unless they saw the images up against a comparable encode from Procoder. Btw, we use Macs and PCs on a daily basis for various post production tasks and have no real bias either way. Our tests were carried out by DVD authoring specialists together with broadcast engineers taking the time and effort to compare in a responsible and scientific way. All tests were carried out from 625/50 source material (film TK'd to DigiBeta; Digibeta-acquired video; DVCAM-acquired video from DSR570P; DVCAM-acquired material from PD150 and VHS archive viewing copies) encoded as PAL-compatible streams. Also, if you want to use a domestic DVD recorder for speed - do NOT use the composite output!!! This is the worst possible connection to use! Use SDI if you're one of the lucky people with a SDI-equipped DVD recorder or - more likely - component analogue YUV if you have that option, otherwise S-Video and then composite only if image quality is of no importance. If you're getting better image results via composite to a DVD recorder than with encoding software from a decent quality digital source image, then there is something seriously wrong with your encoding software and/or method! Last edited by Antony Michael Wilson; January 4th, 2007 at 05:57 AM.

January 4th, 2007, 01:12 AM	#2
Jonathan Nelson Major Player Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Kingman Arizona Posts: 298	I know how you feel, I am not happy with the compression either. I did what a lot of people recommended which is capture hdv 24p, edit hdv 24p, export uncompressed, and send to dvd studio. I must have done something wrong because the footage looked terrible using this method. I know I did something wrong :) The process I used next was simply exporting from the hdv 24p timeline using compressor's DVD best quality 90 minutes 16:9 setting. That created the best looking dvd so far but I am not impressed at all with the way it looks on my production monitors. I did notice a few workflows that mentioned not to export from the timeline. I tried other methods but none of them stacked up to the compessor's mpeg2 6.2, dual pass setting. IMO, its still crappy compression but I haven't found a better method yet. I hope someone out there could enlighten us with a workflow that produces better results.

January 4th, 2007, 02:44 AM	#4
Justin Ferar Major Player Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Larkspur, CA Posts: 378	I was never happy with Compressor for DV work. I switched to Bitvice and never looked back. I did a zillion tests and don't really understand why anyone would use Compressor, except for speed. http://www.innobits.com/ That said- I haven't finished any projects in HD yet but I think it's safe to assume that the results will still beat the pants off Compressor. There is a FCP forum at the site and the programmers actually respond to your questions. Pretty cool. Best of luck!

January 4th, 2007, 02:55 AM	#5
Jack Walker Trustee Join Date: Jun 2006 Location: Burbank Posts: 1,811	I don't use FCP. However, I can verify that there can be a huge difference in quality for different encoders. The obvious issues are to keep the edited video as clean as possible with as little contamination by multi-generation deteriorations, etc. -- whether using an intermediary codec or not. Then a quality encoder needs to be used to go from the HDV to an mpeg2 version for the DVD. I don't know which one for the Mac, but a standalone encoder is going to be the one that will give the best results.

January 4th, 2007, 08:29 AM	#7
Antony Michael Wilson Major Player Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: London, UK Posts: 343	I forgot to mention that Procoder Express is incredibly cheap, so if anyone has access to a PC and wants to create excellent quality MPEG2 encodes for DVD on a budget then it's well worth a look.

January 4th, 2007, 08:44 AM	#8
Bill Ravens Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: santa fe, nm Posts: 3,264 Images: 10	I'm not gonna beat my drum too loudly..but, really..... vegas7 and cineform's connectHD works like a dream for me. I burn out to DVD with DVD Architect, CBR=9800, and get beautiful results. No fuss, no muss. In fact, m2T files play so well on my PC that I am archiving everything in m2T. If more people had AVER media Players, I'd burn DVD's in m2t format. non compliant, but what the hell.

January 4th, 2007, 11:28 AM	#9
Mark Silva Major Player Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: Pacific NW Posts: 431	I have been a part-time compressionist at my facility for the last five years. I have found compressor to not be that good as well. Its satisfactory but not great. I have to wonder though, are all of you using the presets or are you actually going in and tweaking the settings? Because most of those presets are awful. If your resizing HD to SD and you don't make sure the resizing section is set to best quality, you'll get a horrible result. As far as best encoders for the money (in software) I have to agree that procoder is probably the best with cinema craft and tsunami following closely.

January 4th, 2007, 12:24 PM	#11
Steve Benner Major Player Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: United States Posts: 590	I usually export a Quicktime Reference from FCP and then import it into compressor and use the 16:9 Best Quality Setting. I have loved the results. I also have downconverted into Uncompressed SD inside of FCP before going into ccompressor, although the results are similar.

January 4th, 2007, 03:18 PM	#13
Joe Bowey Major Player Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Glendale, AZ Posts: 217	So is shooting in HDV and being compressed still better going to Dvd than just shooting in SD? Also Bll Raven, I use Vegas 4 and love it. I just upgraded to 7 but have not installed it because waiting to build a new system so what are you using?

January 4th, 2007, 04:39 PM	#15
Shaun Wilson Regular Crew Join Date: May 2006 Location: Hobart, Australia Posts: 41	Just cos this thread's become a bit more general than FCP... I export QT ref of a mixdown from Avid (DV50 if I'm doing SD, still playing with the best HD option but at the moment just highest bitrate DNxHD) and get TMPGEnc Xpress 4.0 to encode my MPEG2's. Always been quite happy with the results, even lower bit rate CBR's come out reasonable given the amount of compression going on. Very cheap and since version 4.0 you can convert almost anything to almost anything (even has a built in DivX 6 encoder). Would be interested to know how well it stacks up against others tho. Mark, when you say Tsunami I assume you mean the TMPGEnc one? (Must they keep changing their name for different markets?)