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Encoding weirdness
I recently bought the Sony DRX-500UL external firewire combo DVD burner (records CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, and DVD+R/RW), and have started work to make DVD copies from my Sony miniDV camcorder.
After reading tons of info on different sites (and having a small amount of experience making VCDs), I settled on using my existing Pinnacle Studio DV 7 for capturing the DV to a regular DV file, TMPGEnc Plus to do the encoding to DVD MPEG-2 format, and Sonic DVDIt! as my authoring program. I referred to several sites (linked off of DVDRHelp.com) concerning using TMPGEnc for quality DVD encodes.
Originally, I started out using 8000kbit/s single pass encoding, bottom field first, interlaced as my main settings (no filters are applied in TMPGEnc, and I used ES (audio and video) for the output. This produced content that almost filled my DVD+RW (test disc before making my final output), and left no space for some extras (like a photo slideshow, scene index, etc.) that I wanted on the disc, but the quality was good to very good for my intended purpose.
Next, I moved to 2-pass rendering, using 8000kbit/s for the maximum bitrate, 6000 for the average, and 2000 for the minimum, with padding enabled to meet the minimum bitrate (to help ensure compatibility in the players that the final disc might be used in as much as possible). Quality was still pretty good, though there were a few areas that I noticed a slight degradation over the original single pass render. Size on the other hand, was now at around 3GB total, including the extras I want on the disc.
Trying to get the most from the available disc space, I have tried upping the maximum and average bitrates, and lowering the minimum bitrates (9000, 7000, and 1000 kbits/s, respectively) for the 2-pass render. At this point, I started noticing severe motion problems during playback (especially on the set-top DVD players I use for testing). The motion problems are of the sort that appeared when I first used TMPGEnc but had the field order wrong (Field order A- top field first), resulting in severe jittering during any movement on the video.
I've saved TMPGEnc profiles for each of the settings I've tried so far. I also have checked and double checked the settings for the interlaced, field order, etc., and so far everything appears consistent with what I was originally using. I have tried going back to the original 2-pass settings, and still get the same problems. I'm contemplating trying the single pass again (though the results are still too large for anything but a basic disc) to try to see if the problem goes away again.
The only thing I can come up with is that I had installed the Canopus DV Converter / codec, as well as the Panasonic DV codec, in an attempt to see if the output using those resulted in better overall color output in the renders (I've heard that the standard MS codec does nothing to compensate for the NTSC DV 4:1:1 color issue, causing contrast to be a bit strong on certain colors). Since this problem started I've uninstalled both, but so far I haven't figured out why my output still appears wrong.
Q1: Do any of you here have any ideas where I should look, short of a complete format / rebuild of the PC again (just did this last week, thanks to new hardware)?
Q2: I haven't found a way to pick the DV codec I wish TMPGEnc to use for reading the AVI file. Maybe I'm missing a setting / menu somewhere and it should be obvious, but how do I specify which of the available DV codecs should be used before performing the MPEG-2 encode in this program (hint: I'd like to be able to complete this first project, and still be able to play around with the various codecs until I decide what I like best, for use in the future)?
Thanks
Edit: Update- After uninstalling and reinstalling several applications last evening, then repeating the encoding process, my MPEG-2 files are properly interlaced once more (using 1 pass, and both the 2000/8000/6000 and 500/9500/7000 kbit/s 2 pass bitrate settings). I'm not sure what caused the problems I was having, but so long as it works, I'll go with it (knocks on wood).
After reading tons of info on different sites (and having a small amount of experience making VCDs), I settled on using my existing Pinnacle Studio DV 7 for capturing the DV to a regular DV file, TMPGEnc Plus to do the encoding to DVD MPEG-2 format, and Sonic DVDIt! as my authoring program. I referred to several sites (linked off of DVDRHelp.com) concerning using TMPGEnc for quality DVD encodes.
Originally, I started out using 8000kbit/s single pass encoding, bottom field first, interlaced as my main settings (no filters are applied in TMPGEnc, and I used ES (audio and video) for the output. This produced content that almost filled my DVD+RW (test disc before making my final output), and left no space for some extras (like a photo slideshow, scene index, etc.) that I wanted on the disc, but the quality was good to very good for my intended purpose.
Next, I moved to 2-pass rendering, using 8000kbit/s for the maximum bitrate, 6000 for the average, and 2000 for the minimum, with padding enabled to meet the minimum bitrate (to help ensure compatibility in the players that the final disc might be used in as much as possible). Quality was still pretty good, though there were a few areas that I noticed a slight degradation over the original single pass render. Size on the other hand, was now at around 3GB total, including the extras I want on the disc.
Trying to get the most from the available disc space, I have tried upping the maximum and average bitrates, and lowering the minimum bitrates (9000, 7000, and 1000 kbits/s, respectively) for the 2-pass render. At this point, I started noticing severe motion problems during playback (especially on the set-top DVD players I use for testing). The motion problems are of the sort that appeared when I first used TMPGEnc but had the field order wrong (Field order A- top field first), resulting in severe jittering during any movement on the video.
I've saved TMPGEnc profiles for each of the settings I've tried so far. I also have checked and double checked the settings for the interlaced, field order, etc., and so far everything appears consistent with what I was originally using. I have tried going back to the original 2-pass settings, and still get the same problems. I'm contemplating trying the single pass again (though the results are still too large for anything but a basic disc) to try to see if the problem goes away again.
The only thing I can come up with is that I had installed the Canopus DV Converter / codec, as well as the Panasonic DV codec, in an attempt to see if the output using those resulted in better overall color output in the renders (I've heard that the standard MS codec does nothing to compensate for the NTSC DV 4:1:1 color issue, causing contrast to be a bit strong on certain colors). Since this problem started I've uninstalled both, but so far I haven't figured out why my output still appears wrong.
Q1: Do any of you here have any ideas where I should look, short of a complete format / rebuild of the PC again (just did this last week, thanks to new hardware)?
Q2: I haven't found a way to pick the DV codec I wish TMPGEnc to use for reading the AVI file. Maybe I'm missing a setting / menu somewhere and it should be obvious, but how do I specify which of the available DV codecs should be used before performing the MPEG-2 encode in this program (hint: I'd like to be able to complete this first project, and still be able to play around with the various codecs until I decide what I like best, for use in the future)?
Thanks
Edit: Update- After uninstalling and reinstalling several applications last evening, then repeating the encoding process, my MPEG-2 files are properly interlaced once more (using 1 pass, and both the 2000/8000/6000 and 500/9500/7000 kbit/s 2 pass bitrate settings). I'm not sure what caused the problems I was having, but so long as it works, I'll go with it (knocks on wood).