I have spent the last few hours searching the boards and can't find an exact answer for the question I have. I have a panasonic pv-gs200 dv camcorder. I want to burn dvds w/ the home video content that I've recorded in the past few months. I am currently using widows movie maker to capture the content via firewire to the hard disk (capturing in dv-avi format). When I play back the files using wmp they look fantastic. Next, I am converting them using TMPGEnc plus 2.5. I then author them and burn them using TMPGEnc DVD Author. When I watch the burned dvd I have no audio/video sync problems whatsoever but the video quality is greatly degraded from the original avi. The most noticeable difference is the framerate (the picture stutters when I pan the camera very fast along the scenery for instance while in the orig avi it is seemless and fluid). Please advise as to what I can do to fix the problem. Any help is greatly appreciated. thanks...
What are your settings in TMPGenc? There a variety of things that can be going on: - INTERLACING, preserve it if your camera outputs interlaced signal, best to get camera with progressive scan CCD - EDITING, are you dumping the video straight into TMPGenc? Or are you editing it with MovieMaker? Best not re-compress the new versions because each and every time you save the movie, it will re-encode it and you'll lose quality. Even though DV is a digital format, it's also a lossy format like JPEG and by the time you've extracted it from the camera, it's already been compressed once. Each and every time you save it later, you'll lose quality. Best to edit with VirtualDub and use the "Direct Stream Copy" option under the Video meny. Then you can cut and splice without re-encoding the signal. - ENCODING RESOLUTION, with encoding into MPEG2 with TMPGenc, you'll want to make sure you use the full DVD resolution of 720x480, don't use the smaller sizes. Again, don't de-interlace the signal or else you'll get that stuttering effect (or try swapping the odd/even field orders). - BITRATE, keep it high, 3500-4500kbps will let you put about 2.5-3.0 hours on a DVD at decent quality.
First of all, sometimes the conversion program that you use makes a difference. Secondly, converting avis into mpegs sometimes does result in poor quality. So it may be better to use a burning program that encodes and burn avis (e.g. DVDSanta, Nero). If necessary, you may change the codec of the avis (e.g. into XviD) such that they would be recognized and accepted by these programs.
