Posted by Bill Fright on 10/31/78 11:42

PTravel wrote:
> "Everyguy" <everyguy@Nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:GmWRf.1766$HW2.420@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...
>
>>I notice that if I limit DVD's of home video to 1 hour, the quality is
>>considerably cleaner. The graininess that shows up in certain areas at
>>times
>>in the longer DVD - basically go away. Some people might not even notice
>>the
>>difference but I do.
>>
>>So why is it a commercial DVD can contain a complete movie plus whiz bang
>>graphics and "extras" and still look very sharp, even on a computer
>>monitor
>>which I find generally has fuzzier resolution than a TV? Or even one of
>>these "squeezed" DVD's on a CD with a full length movie can still look
>>very
>>good, with obviously far less data?
>>
>>Is it that the master they're working from is so much sharper it can take
>>more degradation, or the process they use to compress the video, or...?
>>
>
>
> First of all, the source material on commercial DVDs is he highest-quality
> (usually), which helps.
>
> However, the big difference is in transcoding to mpeg2. Proper transcoding
> takes multiple passes -- each frame must first be analyzed in sequence and,
> only after the analysis has been performed, actually compressed. Consumer
> software transcoders, such as are found in many low-end editing and DVD
> authoring programs, are optimized for speed, rather than quality. DVD
> camcorders and low-end computer capture cards that capture direct to mpeg do
> single-pass encoding on-the-fly and produce poor quality transcodes.
>
> There are consumer alternatives, however. I transcode using tmpgenc, a
> standalone program. Tmpgenc is very "tweakable" and, at its highest-quality
> settings can approach commercial DVD quality with good source material. The
> downside is, it's very slow. A 2-hour video can take up to 24 hours to
> transcode with tmpgenc on my 3 .1GHz P4 machine. However, the results are
> worth the extra time, in my opinion.
>
>
>



Let's not forget the glass. My town is swamped by the film festival
crowd right now and I saw someone with one of those little Panasonic
100A looking cameras with a big HD on the side. It cracked me up because
the lense was comparible to what's on my phone.

Fine lenses are huge for quality images.

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