DVCPRO 50 to DVD

[Mark Donnell]

I have read several times that DVCPRO 50 is a great format to print to DVD, and recently shot an event in DVCPRO 50. I use a PC with Edius Broadcast 4.0, and have a recent NERO edition plus TMPGEditor. What would be a recommended workflow for best quality to DVD ?

[Noah Kadner]

Well it's like with any other source- send the final edit into MPEG-2 encoding at best possible settings.

-Noah

[Mark Donnell]

Noah - this is an area that I have very little experience, but I know that there are options such as transport stream versus program stream. I understand that bit rate is key - I seem to remember that on a project a year ago I used a bit rate of 9800. I would appreciate any insight on these issues, rather than having to learn by trial and error. Thanks

[Noah Kadner]

I am not an Edius user- but I would imagine it comes with some sort of manual that explains the basics. It's not that tricky to make a DVD.

Noah

[TingSern Wong]

Go to Glass Valley EDIUS forum and post - you will find more experts in EDIUS than here.

Thomson Grass Valley Desktop Solutions Forums

[Tom Klein]

Originally Posted by Mark Donnell

Noah - this is an area that I have very little experience, but I know that there are options such as transport stream versus program stream. I understand that bit rate is key - I seem to remember that on a project a year ago I used a bit rate of 9800. I would appreciate any insight on these issues, rather than having to learn by trial and error. Thanks

Hi Mark,
DVD forums are best for this questions,
The Bit rate is most important, if your encoding to a DVD-R recordable media that you'll burn yourself , I suuggest a bit rate no higher than 6.5, that is because a high rate can "Choke" a player and have it "Freeze" on DVD-R recordable media.
If your encoding for "Replication" you can go up to 9mbs no worries, they are glass mastered and stamped , rather than burnt in your own burner.
set everything else to best, It's always a good ides to do some tests on small clips and make up your own pre-sets for future encodes... don't worry about transport or program streams, just export your mpeg file seperate from the audio file..
learning by trial and error is best in my opinion, you will not make the same mistakes twice that way.
Cheers
Tom K

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Mark Donnell

I have read several times that DVCPRO 50 is a great format to print to DVD, and recently shot an event in DVCPRO 50.

It may be worth mentioning that a lot depends which part of the world you live in - NTSC or PAL. Whichever system you use, DVDs are encoded with 4:2:0 colour and MPEG2 - no problem with that - same with standard definition broadcast digital TV.

What does make a difference with acquisition formats is that in the NTSC world, ALL the DV25 variations (DV, DVCAM and DVCPRO) use 4:1:1 colour sampling - as many colour samples as luminance vertically, but only a quarter as many horizontally. Hence, shoot with one of those, output to DVD, and you end up with an effective 4:1:0 chroma resolution - only an 1/8 as many chroma samples as luminance. Not good, hence the popularity of DVCPRO50. You start off with 4:2:2, end up with true 4:2:0.

It's different in PAL. Here, DV and DVCAM are both 4:2:0, so no loss of chroma information when you reencode for DVD. (Though if using a P2 type camera at 25Mbs, it's best to select "DV", not "DVCPRO" - PAL DVCPRO is 4:1:1, as with NTSC.)

In the NTSC world, there's a lot of merit in starting off with DVCPRO50 as opposed to any of the DV25 formats. In the PAL world, the benefits are far smaller, and I'd argue ( for a DVD final output) not worth the doubling of data rate.

[Mark Donnell]

Just a follow-up - I edited the DVCPRO 50 on Edius and coded it to "best quality" MPEG2 using Procoder 3. I took that into Pinnacle Studio 11, modified a stock menu and used a couple of stock transitions, and ended up with a really great-looking DVD. Even frame-by frame looked quite good, and the color was excellent.