Best export settings for HD video to DVD

[Guest]

hello, I now use premier pro cs5, from cs4 on my mac, love it, but I shoot with a cannon XL H1s HD video, my questiion is when viewing video from camera or on the screen in cs5, perfect hd picture, but when I export to DVD, i see in the media encoder if I choose mpeg2-DVD it goes output to 720x480, how do I export to dvd for the best HD seetings for DVD to get a HD playback on the DVD, now I see an OK video on the TV playback, but not the same as the original recording, can anyone help,, thanks in advance for any help.....

[the_wine_snob]

Welcome to the forum.

To get full HD with more than moments of Duration, you will want to author a BD (Blu-ray Disc), at use either MPEG-2 HD, or H.264, the accepted BD formats.

Good luck,

Hunt

[Guest]

Thankyou, what if we use standard DVD discs, can we this HD settings to standard DVD disc, we shoot events in HD, and deliver lots of discs, not everyone has blu-ray players, and blu-rays are much more expensive, hard to pass that expense on , thanks for you help, my export settings show MPEG2-DVD or MPEG2-Blu-Ray

[ShackyC]

I've recently shot a short 7 minute Full HD video that I have edited in Pr CS5 and am looking to export it to the highest possible quality that will play on a DVD player. I will then be creating a DVD in Adobe Encore. What would you suggest the settings should be to achieve the best possible quality on the DVD (both in Pr and En).

I tried my first export using the default/automatic mpeg2-DVD settings and then authored the DVD in Encore, but the quality was terrible! The titles, still images and video looked quite blurry and appeared to 'shake' on the screen.

EDIT- I have just tried to increase the minimum/target/maximum bitrate of the Pr export settings to 9Mbps, hoping that it will give me a much higher quality of file. Estimated Time Remaining: 03:07:32 & 16% complete, so i'll report back soon'ish

[ShackyC]

I found (via a friend who is experienced in Pr & En) that it all comes down to the export/authoring settings.

In Pr, my export settings needed to be adjusted as follows:

1. Format: MPEG2-DVD
2. Preset: PAL Progressive Widescreen High Quality
3. Selected 'DVD' in the Basic Settings section of the
4. Multiplexer tab (this creates a single mpeg file rather than a m2v file which has a separate video and audio file)
5. Selected the highest possible quality (5) in the Basic Video Settings section of the Video tab, changed the TV Standard to PAL (to suit Australian TVs) and then
6. Set the minimum/target/maximum bitrate settings to 8Mbps (when I set it at 9Mbps, the final file had too high a bitrate for DVD)
7. In the Audio tab, I selected PCM as the audio type.
8. I also ensured that the Use Maximum Render Quality checkbox was ticked at the bottom of the export settings window.

Then I exported.

Once encoding was complete I opened Encore, started a new project, selected DVD as the authoring mode and PAL as the Television Standard within the Basic settings for the new project. I then imported the final mpeg file as a timeline into Encore, set all the appropriate first play/title button/end play functions as necessary, then I opened the Edit Quality Presets window from the File menu and made the following settings;

1. Format: MPEG2-DVD
2. Presets: PAL DV High quality 8Mb CBR 1 Pass
3. Basic Video Settings - Quality: set to maximum (5)
4. Basic Video Settings - Field Order: None (Progressive)
5. Basic Video Settings - Pixel Aspect Ratio: Widescreen 16:9
6. Basic Video Settings - Bitrate Settings - Bitrate [Mbps]: set to maximum (9)
7. Basic Audio Settings - Audio Format Settings: Audio Format: PCM
8. click OK

Then I authored the DVD and was quite pleased with the result. Still not quite to the quality I was hoping for (i.e. the quality of a DVD movie), but still a significant improvement on my initial attempts using default Pr & En settings.

Hope it helps

[ShackyC]

Another issue that I just discovered is that one of the 7 Audio Tracks i've used appears to be out of sync in the exported mpeg file. I'm currently updating Pr and hoping that that might fix it, however looking at some of the discussions out there on the interwebs, i'm not hopeful this will fix the issue. As the file i'm working on is a music video, having one of the vocal tracks out of sync is massively obvious and severely impacts on the final product.

any suggestions on this one?

[ExactImage]

artisan3425 wrote:

Thankyou, what if we use standard DVD discs, can we this HD settings to standard DVD disc, we shoot events in HD, and deliver lots of discs, not everyone has blu-ray players, and blu-rays are much more expensive, hard to pass that expense on , thanks for you help, my export settings show MPEG2-DVD or MPEG2-Blu-Ray

I know I'm late to the pary on this one, but if you think about this for a second,  if DVDs could do HD and play it back on a DVD player, why would they have bothered to invent Blu-ray?

DVD players are standard definition.  End of Story.  The fact that some Blu-ray players (but not all) will read Blu-ray encoded material from a DVD as well as Blu-ray discs (albeit much shorter) doesn't change the fact that DVD players won't be able to play it.

ShackyC wrote:

Another issue that I just discovered is that one of the 7 Audio Tracks i've used appears to be out of sync in the exported mpeg file. I'm currently updating Pr and hoping that that might fix it, however looking at some of the discussions out there on the interwebs, i'm not hopeful this will fix the issue. As the file i'm working on is a music video, having one of the vocal tracks out of sync is massively obvious and severely impacts on the final product.

any suggestions on this one?

If it's out of sync in an older version it's likely to be out of sync after you upgrade too.    When ever I found a track was out of sync I could always trace it back to the source sequence as being the problem.

Turn off all the other tracks and listen to just that one, at the start, middle and end, and check to see if the time is drifting at all.

[ShackyC]

I've checked the tracks in question and both appear to be fine. I can't work out why they would be falling out of sync during export.

[ExactImage]

If you select the audio in question, then perform a "Render and Replace" from the menu, is it still in sync?

If you are hesitant to do this on your timeline, either duplicate the sequence and try it there, or make a copy of this audio, disable the orignal and do it to the copy.

Depending on the codec and smaple rate strange things could happen.  If you allow Premiere Pro to do a render and replace *and* it's still in sync when you play it back it's probably going to be OK on export too.

[ShackyC]

Sorry ExactImage, I can't seem to find Render and Replace in the menu?

EDIT: Found it in 'Edit in Soundbooth' > Render & Replace

[ExactImage]

No No No .... not in soundbooth.....

First, select the audio clip in question then in the menu .....

Cip --> Audio Options --> Render and Replace

[ShackyC]

ExactImage, just rendered the audio file in Sb and then played it in Pr and it was out of sync like in the exported file....

Hoping it will work after export now

found that doing it via Clip>Audio Options>Render and Replace did the exact same thing, but was much easier as I could select all of my clips and R&R at the same time (when doing it via File>Edit in Soundbooth>Render and Replace you can only do it one clip at a time).

thanks again!

[ShackyC]

What I am trying to work out, is that I've just completed another DVD using these settings and even though the footage was all full-HD, the final exported video was less than 8 minutes long and was almost 500MB in size, yet it still doesn't 'look' anywhere near as good as DVD movies.

I'm wondering how studios get a three hour feature onto a 5Gb DVD and get it to look so good.

Surely if i'm using full-HD footage, I should be able to get that same footage to look as close to HD as you can get on a DVD...

any comments?

[DVDmike]

I have not seen too many 3 hour features films on a single layer DVD.  Can you name one?

[JaysonM-Y]

The one I tried to do last month... Gotta make the the m2v file with a different program. Also, the quality is extremely awful... like, really bad.

[ShackyC]

Really Mike? THAT is the point you want to discuss from my post? Perhaps focus on the question i'm asking...

<EDIT> i.e. why do commercial feature DVD's have such good quality for such 'large' files and yet it is so difficult to get the best possible quality image into relatively small files?

[JaysonM-Y]

If you get your hands on such a dvd you could in theory pull one of the VOB files and drop it into something like gSpot or Media Coder to see what it's made of... but in my experience it never really helps you to match back the export setting for setting... but it's good info.

[DVDmike]

This is a a much better question:

i.e. why do commercial feature DVD's have such good quality for such 'large' files and yet it is so difficult to get the best possible quality image into relatively small files?

Than:

how do studios get a three hour feature onto a 5Gb DVD and get it to look so good

If you ask the three hour question, a proper response would be that they use dual layer discs.

[Jim_Simon]

why do commercial feature DVD's have such good quality

Several reasons.  For starters, most Hollywood DVDs start out on film or digital cinema.  Second, the studios use expert compressionists with $50,000 tools for the creation process.  Your HD video and Adobe tools just can't compete.

[chrism3171]

Often commercial DVD's are Dual-Layer discs that hold nearly double the data than standard single layer DVD's

[Sumit1988]

worked awesome for me. Thank you very much!

[danni_r7]

Hi all!

Here's a simple and fast workaround that I used to downscale HD video for creating DVD-Video:

step 1: export video from Premiere Pro as MPEG2 (not MPEG2-DVD) at 100% Quality, CBR 100 Mbps bitrate, frame size and frame rate corresponding to your desired DVD video format (PAL or NTSC).. Don't export Full HD. Then do a couple more adjustments: under advanced settings choose reduction for "noise control" and 11 bits for "Intra DC Precision".. and check render at maximum depth & maximum render quality, of course.

step 2: throw the exported video file into Nero Video and create a DVD Video using custom settings for best quality.

I got much better results this way than exporting as MPEG2-DVD from Premiere Pro followed by Encore or Nero to create the DVD.

There are other methods too, that might provide even better results, but they involve more steps and software apps. In those methods, Premiere Pro is also used just for exporting a very high quality file to further "play" with.

Cheers!

[chintan6586]

@danni_rj

Hey. I was wondering to etr the same thing as you did.. I tried mpeg2 option with 720p resolution. Then burn the DVD with disc burner software.. though it worked in my DVD player with good quality video..

But I did it for the first time.. have you faced any issue with this settings.??

[cleporehart]

Yes, these settings gave me better dvd quality.

[zachk60337278]

I had issues doing MPEG2 as a substitute for MPEG2-DVD and decided to encode as H.264 and 720p at high enough bitrate to keep it within the scale of the size of DVD, etc. The results look great. My 40 minute video clip (originally HD) looked great compressed down to 720 and retained most of the quality... now for the next mystery- getting into Encore and seeing what that encoder would do to it. I made sure the transcode settings were set to good bit rate, etc. I was pleasantly surprised as it kept the quality. 

I'm now about to burn the ISO to disc on my machine with the burner so we'll see, but I'm not worried based on fact my ISO played in DVD player looked so much less grainy/blurry than when I had gone the MPEG2 route in Adobe Media Encoder. Cheers!