Poor DVD quality with Toast 10 Titanium Pro

[Video Tom]

Hi,

I have used Final Cut Express to edit a film with AVCHD footage. Following the FCE recommendations I exported the film as QuickTime Movie. The resulting .mov file has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 with Apple Intermediate Codec and looks flawless when I play it with QuickTime on the big iMac screen in full-screen mode.

To publish the film on DVD (to be played on any normal DVD player connected to a TV) I have used Toast 10 Titanium Pro (10.0.7).

There seems to be not a lot of choice when producing a DVD from a .mov file.

I have tried a few different settings on the Encoding but no matter what I choose I get a poor result on DVD.

There is a lot of horizontal distortion, vertical lines look 'fuzzy', the colors seem washed out and the whole picture is just far from a good DVD image.

The last settings I tried in Toast are:

Videoformat: MPEG-2

Average Bitrate: 9.0 Mbps (max.)

Max. Bitrate: 9.0 Mbps (max.)

Motion Estimation: Optimal

Half-PEL on

New Encoding: Always

Lower Half Image first

Aspect Ratio 16:9

Does anyone have an idea what I could possibly do to improve the DVD quality?

[tsantee]

To begin with some DVD players will choke on a DVD with that high a bit rate. You can be okay with a maximum of 9 mbps (as long as you're using Dolby Digital audio) but you should lower the average to 8 or 7.5.

 

But that doesn't address your issue. I experimented some with a hdv video recorded by my brother. I found it looked best after encoding with Toast if I exported from Final Cut as a 16:9 DVCPRO 50 NTSC file and marked the progressive box. So have the Final Cut export do the rescaling.

[Video Tom]

Hi tsantee, your idea with the DV-Stream format was perfect. I have done it for PAL with 48khz and progressive and the result is excellent. This is the DVD quality I expected. Thanks a lot!