What resolution settings for DVD output

[bjory]

Which of the resolution settings should I use for output into DVD?

All the resolution settings doesn't seems to fit the DVD resolution of 720 x 576 for PAL.

Full HD: 1920 x 1080 (60 fields / 16Mbps)
Full HR: 1920 x 1080 (60 fps/ 24Mbps)
Full SHQ: 1920 x 1080 (30 fps/ 12Mbps)
HD-SHQ: 1280 x 720 (30 fps/ 9Mbps)
TV-SHQ: 640 x 480 (30 fps/3Mbps)

 

[tim]

DVD Authoring software except the following standard:
DVD PAL - 720 X 576, 25 fps
DVD NTSC - 720 X 480, 29.9fps

Therefore you need to re-render the files to the above . Some DVD Authoring S/W can
re-render the file for you.

 

[bjory]

But if I use the 640 x 480 settings, wouldn't it be loss of quality if I output into DVD?

 

[jaegersing]

Are you talking about camera settings when you shoot video, or project settings when you edit, or what?

If these are camera settings, then try shooting the same scene with the various options and
then compare the results. If you want to save on disk space, you can choose the lowest bitrate option that gives you acceptable quality. Or if you just want the best quality, go for the highest bit rate option (although I would want to check that the HR frame rate does not cause any problems in my video editor).

As mentioned, all of these settings do not match the DVD frame size, so whichever one you select, you will need to resize the video during the outpur rendering process.

The TV-SHQ settings has less resolution and lower bit rate than a DVD can provide, so personally I would not want to shoot in that mode.

 

[bjory]

What happens if I need to do some editing?

I tried using Premiere and editing is a pain, as I kept encountering problem when opening Sanyo video files .mp4 in Premiere.

It could be due to my PC configuration slow hardware.

What I did finally is to convert all the mp4 into DVAVI low quality and use Premiere to do the editing.

Is there any less painful way to keep converting into AVI and import back into Premiere? It took me 3 days just to edit proper a 15 mins video.

Problem with Sanyo cams are they don't allow changing the file format into AVI.

 

[jaegersing]

I am surprised that you describe DVAVI as low quality. Although it is SD resolution, the data rate is 25Mbps and the quality is higher than the best DVDs. How are you doing the conversion to DVAVI? Maybe that can be improved?

Another option, provided you have enough hard disk space, is to use a lossless codec like Lagarith for editing in HD resolution. This should give better performance compared with editing mp4 files on a slow computer.

For file conversion, download the Super converter and convert all the mp4 clips to Lagarith AVI with the same resolution and frame rate as the mp4 files. This will result in minimum degradation.

Then edit the Lagarith AVI files in Premiere and render to DVD format MPEG2 when you are finished editing.