Compressed Mov Files And Poor Quality Video On Dvds

[AnthonyTDOG]

I recently purchased Roxio Toast 11 Titanium. I have a Macbook Pro with OS X 10.9.3.

I'm trying to burn DVDs from an mov file that was exported from Avid Media Composer. Here's some info on the mov file:

4.21 GB

Dimensions: 1920 x 1080

Codecs: AVdn, Linear PCOM, Timecode

Duration 4:46

2 Audio channels

 

Okay, so my problem is that DVDs I've burned from this file on Toast look awful. I don't expect to maintain the quality of the original quicktime file, but the DVDs look terrible, to the degree that everything (even on my 15-inch Macbook screen) looks slightly out of focus.

 

Whenever I import the MOV file to Toast in order to burn the movie to a DVD, Toast compresses the file to an MPEG-2 that is less than 300 MB. Even if I bump up the video quality as high as it will go, the video file is still compressed to 320 MB. What's going on here, can I get an MPEG-2 that's not so outlandishly compressed, and is it possible to burn watchable DVDs on Toast 11 Titanium?

Technical whizzes, come to my aid!

[d_deweywright]

So, you didn't follow the reasoning I posted initially? At 4 minutes 46 seconds, a standard definition MPEG2 file, at high quality, takes up about 320MB. When you create a DVD disc, it is in Standard Definition, in an MPEG2 format. Those are the standards. That is what you told it to create, so that's what it had to compress it to.

[tsantee]

Remember to evaluate the quality of a video DVD by watching it on a TV at actual size (not zoomed). Do not judge a video DVD by how it looks on a computer display unless you are viewing it at about one-fourth of the screen's size.

[AnthonyTDOG]

Remember to evaluate the quality of a video DVD by watching it on a TV at actual size (not zoomed). Do not judge a video DVD by how it looks on a computer display unless you are viewing it at about one-fourth of the screen's size.

 

Hey, Digital Guru. So, do you mean that the DVD will look sharper on a TV than a computer screen? Just out of curiosity, why is that?

My larger question was this: do you understand why Roxio compressed my 4.21 GB file down to 320MB before burning it to the DVD?

[AnthonyTDOG]

So, you didn't follow the reasoning I posted initially? At 4 minutes 46 seconds, a standard definition MPEG2 file, at high quality, takes up about 320MB. When you create a DVD disc, it is in Standard Definition, in an MPEG2 format. Those are the standards. That is what you told it to create, so that's what it had to compress it to.

 

Ah... Thanks. No, none of this was in your first post, but it makes sense now. Basically, the MPEG2 format has a low ceiling for quality and that ceiling for a five minute video is around 320 MB. Got it.

[d_deweywright]

I'm a PC user, so I can't really help much with Toast, but we can torture some numbers here, and see what they'll confess to.

 

On a single layer DVD, at best quality, we can figure you'll get about 1 hour of video. You're working with 4:46, so let's round that up to 5 minutes and call it 1/12 of an hour.

 

Now, of course they say a single layer DVD holds 4.7GB. But that's assuming at 1billion bytes is the same as 1GB. It's not, so a DVD really holds more like 4.2 GB, so let's round that down to 4GB.

 

Your 320MB file is roughly 1/3 of a GB, or to extrapolate, about 1/12 of 4GB.

 

In time, 1/12 of a full disc, and in data size 1/12 of a full disc. So, it actually does make sense.

 

A DVD is Standard Definition, so you're 1920x1080 video is going to be reduced to 720x405, with black bars on the top and bottom to fill it out to be 720x480. Those are the standards we have to live with. If you want to keep the HD quality, you could consider creating an AVCHD disc, which is HD format video, on a DVD disc. It won't play on a DVD player, but a number of Blu-Ray players (most?) now support the AVCHD format. So, if that's an option, you may want to consider it.

 

Hope that helps? I'm hoping a Toast user will jump in too and be able to shed some more light on this for you.