Hopefully someone can guide me to getting better quality from a CS5 DVD.
Source video is high def footage from Canon HFM41 camcorder. I edit in Pinnacle Studio on a PC. In the case of this project, the end video is 36 minutes in length. I output to a 1080i MPEG2 file, even though for the time being I will only be making a standard DVD, someday I may want to take the same file and make a Blu-Ray disc.
In Encore CS5(Mac), I import the file as a timeline. I add a main menu, 7 submenu pages for the 37 chapters, and a 2nd audio track.
Since it is only 36 minutes, I should be able to get max quality on a DVD. For transcoding, I choose Automatic, and Max Render Quality. But when I watch the final DVD, any scenes of action look terrible. I've tried many different transcode settings such as DV High Quality 7MB 2 pass VBR, and I even tried copying this preset to a "DV High Quality 8MB 2 pass VBR". No big improvement in quality. Sometimes the transcoding took 8 hours on a 3 year old iMac i5. Very frustrating, especially when I can burn a DVD right out of Pinnacle Studio, and the quality is outstanding.
Can anyone give me the settings I need in CS5 to get the max quality for a 36 minute DVD?
My next step would be to output 2 files from Studio, the 1080i MPEG2 AND a standard DVD MPEG2 file. Then import the DVD file into Encore. But shouldn't a professional level program such as Encore be able to do better encoding than a $99 consumer package such as Pinnacle Studio.
Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.