[MacDV] How does one increase quality of final encoding?

[Brett Conlon]

Heya

... sick of me yet?

Plz don't answer that!!!  ;-}

I've now completed my 3rd project and my first dual layer disc. I encoded 
the footage at 8mbps CBR. When I played the disc at home on my 68cm Sony 
TV the playback looked pretty good compared with the original footage off 
the DV tape from my Panasonic GS-400. The only complaint I have is that 
there is a visible flickering when the camera pans at any decent speed and 
if there is anything bright red (shirts/plastic cups etc) it really flares 
and jumps when it moves on screen. The original footage on the tape when 
the camera is panning appears perfectly smooth when played directly to the 
TV and red objects don't have the same problem.

As a test I took my DVD to my parent's place and played it on their 42" 
Teac plasma screen. I was rather shocked at how low quality the DVD 
looked. I could see pixellation and artifacts everywhere. Feeling rather 
depressed about my results (that have taken me flippen' ages to finally 
get) I decided to come back the next day with my video camera to check to 
see just how different the original to the DVD looked.

The next time I viewed my project it somehow looked better, reduced sized 
blocks of pixels (I'm not sure why) but it was still too chunky for my 
liking, and when I plugged the camera in I could also see pixels but they 
were much finer and again the movement was much smoother than the DVD - a 
result I was happy to settle with.

I realise that looking at this stuff on this size a large screen will 
bring out the worst in your project but at the same time it has made the 
"differences" much more obvious. Thinking that one day I may too own a 
large size screen I'm trying to plan towards the future.

I then decided to try a manufactured DVD to see how the quality looked on 
this big screen (to see if I could see artifacting) so I inserted their 
"Tomb Raider" DVD and it was a remarkably clear picture - even with fast 
motion there was no flickering.

So this leads me to ask how I might be able to eeeek out more quality in 
my projects. I realise that the quality of the footage the producers of 
the Tomb Raider DVD had is FAR superior to what I'm recording on my camera 
and they would have hardware encoders worth thousands so probably therein 
lies the difference.

But surely I can work "smarter" to get my footage looking at least as good 
as the tapes I'm capturing off, perhaps?

As I've mentioned in previous emails, my setup is (all small home stuff):

- Panasonic GS400 MiniDV captured by FCE 1.0 then edited.
- Exported as FCMovie to DVDSPro2.0.
- Footage encoded at 8mbps CBR
- Burned to DVD (SL to Superdrive/DL to LaCie)

Your help would be most appreciated!!!

Many thanks,

Coj

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net 
and he won't bother you for weeks."