Posted by Doc on 09/10/06 01:40

I find that a 1-hour DVD from DV initial footage looks good. However, at 2
hours, the image quality takes a very noticeable hit. I just put together a
DVD of highlights from America's Got Talent and it came to just about two
hours. The raw clips are either intially captured directly to my Dig8
camcorder and dumped into the computer, or done via pass-through from a VCR.
The initial tv signal is off the antenna, but NBC comes in very strong here,
so the intial image quality is decent.

Authoring with Pinnacle Studio 9. The initial files look good, but on a 2
hour DVD, the footage takes on a dull look, loss of resolution, a lot of
noticeable pixelation artifacts in the darker areas in the background etc.

Do you think what I'm experiencing is a shortcoming in the rendering
capabilities of Pinnacle, a shortcoming with DV or is it just unrealistic to
expect to retain a significant amount of resolution at 2 hours? I tried
rendering some of the same footage as mpeg2 with Ulead DVD studio but that
actually seems to look worse when converted to a test DVD.

I just popped in a commercially made DVD of a modern movie. The film is
right at 90 minutes, with maybe another 5 - 10 mins of preview trailers for
other movies. Different uinverse as far as quality of the image. I realize
it's better source footage to begin with, can there be a major difference in
the rendering of the footage? Bug issues aside (I fortunately haven't had
any so far under XP) how well regarded or not are the rendering capabilities
of Pinnacle Studio?

I keep hearing about TEMPGenc, do you feel I would get a significant boost
in image quality using it to render the mpeg files and then render those
under Pinnacle?

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