Can DV ever look good in MPEG2?

I just made a DVD of a large project, shot in multimcam DV at 60i (DVXs and XL-1s). The video had bright scenes in daylight and darker scenes of stage performances in a nightclub under colored lights. I had a lot of trouble finding an MPEG-2 compression setting that didn't make all the edges look jaggy. Even at the highest setting (2-pass VBR Best) there were definite "stair-step" patterns in the darker scenes, like when a brightly-lit shoulder was positioned against the black backdrop. (The edges in the daylight scenes were better but not entirely smooth either).

I know that Hollywood quality DVDs are out of the question here, but I'm just wondering if there's any other way to improve the image quality of DV on DVD. Would BitVice do any better job than Compressor here? How about de-interlacing first? Or are we just limited by the nature of the source material?

I've never been impressed with the look of DV. I know it can look awesome . . FOR DV . . but it's never looked as good (in my faulty opinion) as Film or Beta video. Those jaggy edges are a thing that will always be seen with DV as far as I have noticed in every DV projects I have watched. However some cameras will produce less jaggedy edges than others. It's harder to composite with DV than it is with film and Beta also.

Owner of a GL1 and JVCGYDV300U
Adam

The jaggies aren't an issue in the original footage though which is all shot with 3-chip cameras and looks pretty good. My complaint isn't with DV, rather what the MPEG-2 compression does to the footage.

<<<all shot with 3-chip cameras and looks pretty good.>>>

And you know this because you're watching it how? Same monitor you're using for the output DVD? No fair watching one on a flat monitor and the other on a television monitor. They produce very different pictures and respond differently to problems.

If you get constant horizontal jaggies that move with scene motion, you could be suffering from plain interlace problems. Do a test. Pick a scene that has bad problems, go back to the timeline and apply the deinterlace filter, export that test scene and burn another disk.

Koz

If not an interlace problem, do you have illegal chroma and luminance in your program? I'm guessing this could be a big part of the problem. Try a test on one of the bad bits by making it legal and then outputting to MPEG.

Stupid question time.....are you running in a 'clean' FCP environment?

The very first DVD's I tried to do (a year and a half ago) had severe motion issues (FCP HD 4.5 and DVDSP2) - all shot with a single-chip DV camcorder. Granted, the footage was sports (soccer matches), so there was a lot of motion. I originally thought the issue had to do with Compressor, so I did an experiment where I did a small, one minute clip from the match with about 16 different Compressor settings. All had the same issue, until I deinterlaced the footage. Aha! I thought - that's it! But something still didn't seem right. I just didn't think one should have to deinterlace entire projects to get a decent DVD....

It was only then that I decided to bite the bullet and set up a 'clean' environment on a second HD. Basic OS and Quicktime, and just FCP suite and DVDSP2.....(this was a while ago, so it was early Panther)......BINGO! Suddenly, my MPEG2 compressions looked 'right', without any additional treatment or de-interlacing.

Also, I discovered the best way to move from FCP to DVDSP is to export your project as a QT movie (NOT self-contained), then pull that into Compressor. If you choose to output directly to Compressor from within FCP, there seem to be issues with output quality. The details of this workflow have been documented elsewhere here in the Forum (and maybe some other places, too).

Just a thought....

Jeff Elliott
Eastern Soccer Video Network
sokkerjeff@yahoo.com

You should smooth the DV chroma before rendering the final render out uncompressed.

Dupe your DV timeline,

on the dupe set the compression to uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2

to every DV clip apply the Apple DV 4:1:1 chroma smoother filter, (or my G Nicer for better results)

Export uncompressed movie,

take to compressor and make DVD. You'll really notice the difference on coloured lights etc.

Graeme



[www.nattress.com] - Plugins for FCP-X

Graeme

don't get it

by : "the final render out uncompressed" you mean this could improve any final render in Dv, shooted on Dv, edited Dv and delivered on tape or Dvd ?

Well, if you go back to DV tape you won't get any improvement, but you can use that method to eliminate a final render to DV and hence improve output to DVD or DigiBeta tape, say.

Graeme



[www.nattress.com] - Plugins for FCP-X

I have also found that exporting as an animation at best settings will help a lot.
For some reaswon (Could be my fault) even the non-selfcontained" quicktimes movies look like **** compared to the animation when I go to DVD.
SO...
I go straight from FCP to Animation
From Animation straight into DVD Studio Pro.

If anyone has a better idea I'm all ears.