DVD Quality

[Tariq Peter]

Hi All,

I have filmed and edited a 1080p video in FCPX and now trying to supply a DVD to my client. I have tried a a wide variety of settings but the DVD looks plain old awful on a 32" plasma tv or laptop. It looks great on a 32" CRT TV. The client has complained now 5 times and I have no idea what else to do. Can anybody recommend any settings which they feel are safe?

The footage is 25p and filmed at 1920x1080. I am using apple compressor to compress the movie.

Thanks

[Bruce Watson]

Originally Posted by Tariq Peter

I have filmed and edited a 1080p video in FCPX and now trying to supply a DVD to my client. I have tried a a wide variety of settings but the DVD looks plain old awful on a 32" plasma tv or laptop. It looks great on a 32" CRT TV.

If you want it to look great, you'll have to supply the client with a blu-ray. DVD can't, by definition, handle anything close to 1920x1080. IIRC in PAL land a DVD is good for a maximum of 704 x 576 at 50i. And this will probably look fine on an old 32" analog CRT TV, but not so good on a new 32" plasma HDTV.

[Tariq Peter]

Hi,

I have supplied them with both a DVD and Blu-ray however they hated the quality of the DVD. They basically said that they have watched a large majority of home made family DVD's created from things like iMovie and the quality is far superior from what I have supplied. I can only but it down to the encoding settings but have no idea why the quality is as bad as what they have said.

[Robert Benda]

are they watching these iMovie's on their big screen TV? Their laptop is more likely, and that is much easier to make it look good.

[William Hohauser]

Difficult clients.

What are the steps,you are,taking to create this DVD? How long is the project? How are you exporting the project? Are you using the DVD presets or making your own adjustments? What are these adjustments? Have you tried to make a DVD directly out of FCPX using the Share menu?

[Dave Partington]

I've never been happy with the quality of DVDs from compressor / FCPX. We use CUDA downsizing algorithms in Premiere Pro exports to do the resizing, but I have to admit I dislike this solution.

If you watch a DVD after watching the Blu-ray you'll hate it.

If you watch a DVD after editing 1080p, you'll hate it.

Have they told you specifically what they don't like about the quality? Is it aliasing? Is it noise? what's the problem exactly?

Can they supply you with a home DVD you can use to compare against?

How long is the video on the DVD? i.e. how much did you squeeze on ?

[Tariq Peter]

Hi,

I have two videos the first is 15minutes and the second, 1hour 10mins. Both on separate DVDS and both look pixelated

Workflow

Export the movie from FCPX using Share and select Pro Res 422 creating a High Res Movie.
Import the movie into compressor and use the following settings

Video Format
Format = PAL
Frame Rate = 25
Aspect Ratio = 16x9
Field Dominance = Progressive

Quality
One Pass CBR - 7.8Mpbs
Motion Estimation - Best

Gop
Gop Structure = IP
Gop Size = 6

Frame Controls = Off

The Output leaves the video looking extremely blocky with no smooth lines, almost like http://www.softize.net/wp-content/up...e_vreveal1.jpg

Watching the videos back on my own 21" monitor I would have to agree. When I play any Hollywood DVD the quality is amazing.
I understand they use the best encoders in the world but surely with the source footage I have I should be getting a better quality video.

I was looking at CinemaCraft only to read - IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT : WE have discontinued sale of all CINEMA CRAFT products, which promptly put that idea to bed.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

If your Prores results look fine, then obviously it's the encoding process that's at fault. Your settings look okay for 25p. 'Pixelation' is unacceptable, even for consumer grade encoders. It's not rocket science.

It might be a good idea to take the project to another facility to keep this client happy.

And you don't need the 'best encoders in the world' - I have achieved excellent results with Premiere Pro and Encore. Common DVD players upsample to Hi-def, and GPUs do it too.

Does this problem occur with all your projects, or is this the first time? Did it work when you tested this workflow prior to commencing this project?

[Craig Terott]

Between 2008-2009, I spent literally weeks upon weeks of time trying to get my DVDs to look better, to no avail. Ultimately I have concluded Quicktime is the culprit.

You can only improve things by tweaking settings - but the root cause is Quicktime crappy scaling from HD to SD. There's no fix.

Here's the ultimate customer service solution: Ask for the DVD back. Produce another Blu-ray, purchase a Blu-ray player ($59). Ship them their new Blu-ray player and Blu-ray. Wha-la ...happy client.

[William Hohauser]

I have created dozens upon dozens of DVDs from HD master files and never encountered pixelation of any sort. Unless there's an issue with downscaling PAL HD in the DVD encoding process I would suggest you try the short program using the DVD preset in Compressor. Do not change any of the settings especially the GOP. You could also try creating a DVD directly out of FCPX. See how those come out.

You can also first use Compressor to make a downscaled PAL SD file and then use that file to make a DVD from the presets. See how that works.

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Tariq Peter

Watching the videos back on my own 21" monitor I would have to agree. When I play any Hollywood DVD the quality is amazing.

I would suggest taking the good bluray disk to a PC and ripping the HD video files. Then use HCenc with Avisynth and Dan Isaac's hd2sd scripts to create a high quality DVD compatible downconvert.

HC Encoder | BitBurners.com
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page
http://3dvp.com/hd2sd_sd2hd.zip

In my opinion, this free software gets closer than any other software under $1000 to the encoding and downscaling quality of $50,000 pro solutions. If you are good with computers, it is also possible to run this software under the Wine windows emulator on Linux and likely OSX as well.

[Rickey Brillantes]

Tariq, I also have issues with my burn DVD's, pixelated as well, and looks horrible while watching it on my HD TV. I found out that if your using Compressor, change "same as source which is the default from the output fields in Frame Control "to progressive". It will give you much better results, no more pixelating in my experienced.

[Tariq Peter]

Hi,

I have tried progressive and hoping this may work out. I have actually just met the client and watched the video on her TV, I have to say she is being extremely picky but I can understand why.

She has a DVD player and a 40" HDTV, now I did try and explain that watching a video which is being stretched to fit a 40" TV will cause a loss of quality I am limited to the amount I can do.

I could see the issues she was having, faces in the background seemed blocky, and edges were not rounded. It just seemed a like a heap of pixels in the background instead of faces which I have not seen before when watching DVDs on my HDTV.

[Rickey Brillantes]

Pixelating is highly visible on TV's with matte screens, compared to glossy screens, specially those small heads in the background, looks like Lego people or MINECRAFT which my kid is playing right now.

Good luck and let us know the result of the changes.

[David Knaggs]

Originally Posted by Tariq Peter

Quality

One Pass CBR - 7.8Mpbs

Hi Tariq.

Run, don't walk, to your computer and reset your quality mode from "One Pass CBR" to "Two pass VBR Best".

Quick!