Encore CS5 Poor Quality DVD Burns

Hi there,

I’m desperately looking for a solution to a problem I’m having burning DVDs in Encore CS5.

Essentially I’m getting poor quality, washed out and slightly grainy footage on my DVD burns, and yet the videos I am burning are perfect quality when viewed from my HDD.

My workflow, simplified:
• Taken the original footage and imported into After Effects to create any
effects etc.
• Exported from After Effects and imported into Premiere to create final
edits,
• Exported from Premiere and imported into Encore to arrange and
author DVD.

Throughout the process my settings have been as follows:

• MPEG2 PAL 25fps, 720*576px, VBR (Min2, Avg7, Max8), Lower Field First, PCM Audio (as separate file)

… and right up to (and including) the point of viewing the footage in Encore’s ‘monitor’, it looks sharp, crisp and well coloured. It’s only once it’s burned onto the DVD that it looks pretty awful.

Things I’ve tried (to no avail) are:
• Using Dynamic Link instead of exporting / importing between programs
• Trying CBR and VBR with different settings.
• Leaving the footage un-transcoded as they are already MPEG2 with
PCM audio.
• Transcoding with the ‘Automatic’ setting.
• Created an Encore DVD project with just one video (the shortest video
of the crop), and set the transcoding to automatic (to see if space
constraints caused transcoding lower the quality).
• Same as above but not transcoding the video.
• Using different media to burn onto.
• Creating an ISO image of the DVD and burning on another computer.

I’m at a loss with what to try next, as the client’s deadline is creeping up and this is the last barrier to what is otherwise a smooth ride finishing this project.

If anyone has any ideas, comments, or even better - fixes - any help would be much appreciated, as I just get the feeling there is something right under my nose which I’m missing!

Many thanks indeed.