Frustrated with AVCHD to standard DVD!!
by Travis Klein
on
Sep 25, 2009 at 1:47:12 pm
Hello. I'm new to this forum and I hope someone can help me. I will confess to being completely ignorant when it comes to this stuff, only been working with it for about a month and am not happy at all with my results.
I have 2 HD camcorders Sony CX12 and Canon HF S100 (just bought hoping it would fix a problem). I have serveral trial versions of editing software (Vegas, PowerProducer, Premier Elements 7, Pinnacle 14, etc) and Vegas seems to offer the user the most control over the output. So, I've spent most of my time with that. I shot video of my daughter shooting hoops yesterday with both cameras at their highest settings... (canon, 1920x1080 24Mbps, 60i & 30p & 24p), (sony 1920x1080 60i). Each clip was about 2 minutes yielding 4 clips (3 from canon and 1 from sony). I copied files to my video folder and then fired up Sony DVD Architect 5 (trial copy) and created a standard DVD at 720x480, bit rate of 9.8 (I think... highest it would go without error). My wife and I watched the DVD and wouldn't you know it, the 1 year old Sony CX12 looked the best!! The Canon looked horrible with the jaggies and video noise and what is the point of 24p and 30p? The Sony is unacceptable still! What gives? When I look at the time line of both cameras, each frame looks great in itself. The rendering just messes all that up.
I purchased a hi def camcorder a year ago, knowing I wouldn't afford burning blu-ray until the media goes down in price, but wanted to be ready for the future. However, the resulting standard DVD down conversions are awful. Please help. I don't need to use Vegas, if there is something better please let me know. Oh... I also used the out of the box Canon software and that looked horrible as well and didn't offer me any adjustments. Thanks in advance.
Re: Frustrated with AVCHD to standard DVD!! by John Rofrano on Sep 25, 2009 at 10:55:35 pm
I have a Sony CX12 (awesome little camera) and I render my video from Vegas as DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream and audio as Dolby Digital AC3 and then drop those into DVD Architect and they look fantastic. It doesn't compare with the original HD but it's a better looking DVD than anything that comes from SD source.
Re: Frustrated with AVCHD to standard DVD!! by Dave Haynie on Sep 26, 2009 at 9:24:19 am
Well, first thing, you probably don't want to render directly from AVCHD to DVD in DVD Architect. You can (though I never have), but you have no control over the MPEG-2 rendering.
I would keep my project settings at HD (based on the video), render to MPEG-2 "DVD Architect Widescreen" for sample, which does encoding pretty close to the DVD max rate. You'll also need to render audio separately.. use AC-3.
Don't watch your DVD on your PC if you can help it.. after looking at full HD, of course it's going to look bad-by-comparison... but most PC players don't do a nice upscaling, they just magnify the jaggies. Keep in mind, your AVCHD is six times higher resolution than DVD MPEG-2, so don't expect it to look the same.. but it should look reasonable on a TV, compared to other DVDs, assuming good quality video as a starting point.
You certainly want to sync the video to DVD frame-rate. If you're shooting 1080/60i or 1080/30p you want to make a 480/60i DVD.. if you're shooting at 1080/24p, you want to make a 480/24p DVD. Vegas will happily do frame-rate conversion (looks fairly decent if you do it with supersampling, but it will take much, much longer), but don't do it unless you really intend on doing it.
