Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: creating your own dvd for home theatre

This is topic creating your own dvd for home theatre in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Dave Ganoe (Member # 53) on 09-28-2006, 01:20 AM:

Any tips on what software to use or process to do this? I've tried several times and each time the quality of the image is crap. For an example I've tried downloading trailers from apple.com to make a trailer disk for preshow but no matter what I do it comes out with such poor picture quality. I've used mydvd, quicktime pro, nero, windows movie maker, always the same, bad pic quality. Thanks for any advice.

Posted by Phil Blake (Member # 2012) on 09-28-2006, 08:40 AM:

there are some good programs and bad programs out there , some simple to use others very difficult.

I settled with Pinnacle studio 9 it is about middle of the road and gives good dvd results with simple to use features , just takes a while to render , but i think most do unless you have one that renders on the fly.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-28-2006, 09:16 AM:

DVD Studio Pro is the only option that should be considered. Your existence on this planet is not validated until you have used DVD Studio Pro at least 16 times.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-28-2006, 10:42 AM:

One possible issue is with using Quicktime movies in the first place. The trailers on Apple's website are heavily lossy data compressed using the H.264 codec.

Basically you're going to have problems with image quality regardless of what DVD authoring program is used. The source video is already lossy compressed. You're taking that and applying heavy amounts of lossy data compression to it again.

Any "consumer" style DVD authoring program typically applies a flat compression ratio to anything you're converting to MPEG-2. One usually must spend quite a lot of money on professional level compression applications to be able to interactively tweak bitrates for different parts of a video.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-28-2006, 10:49 AM:

Yeah, like DVD Studio Pro which comes with Final Cut Studio.

You'll be surprised how good those HD Apple trailers look when scaled way down to pathetic low-res DVD.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-28-2006, 10:56 AM:

I doubt if Dave is using HD-quality trailers as a source. I suspect he may be using 640 X 480 or lower streams, which would naturally look like ass when converted over to non-square pixel 720 X 480.

Posted by Dave Ganoe (Member # 53) on 09-28-2006, 12:35 PM:

I tried using all the different resolutions that was offered up to 1080 and it didn't seem to make a difference. I will check out the software you mentioned Joe.

Posted by Frank Dubrois (Member # 3042) on 10-15-2006, 01:33 AM:

Is that program available for the vastly superior PC? or is that apple-ware only?

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 10-15-2006, 04:09 AM:

If the PC is superior, then that program will obviously be available for it or maybe something 10 times better! You don't become superior by having crappier software to do what you want/need to do.

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 01-08-2007, 03:54 PM:

As usual the macnazis reply with a non-answer.
DVD Studio Pro is Macintosh only. It's also $1300.00. It IS excellent and there may be nothing better available.
There are PC applications that will do what you want. Pinnacle and Roxio have them I think.
Quicktime is an abortion on a PC, the program qualifies as a virus for how screwed up your system is after installation but there is a hacked mini version that shows MOV videos - but skips the almost irreversible takeover of all video formats from WMP that is seemingly unavoidable with the full QT install. That of course leaves you with QT's puny (except for high res QT videos of course) and unresizable picture size for any video clip playback - lame.
There are ways to add a QT codec to WMP, I've generally failed when I've tried though.