Firstly I am new to all of this! I have a very good quality Canon video camera and have had no problems capturing the film via Firewire to my PC. The quality of the AVI files produced is very good indeed and up till recently I have been editing them and putting them onto VHS tape. Ive been using MGI Videowave. Now I have just invested in a DVD burner and using this software burnt my first DVD. I expected the quality to be much better than VHS but sadly its looking very pixelated and blocky. I experimented by converting the avi files to mpeg2 using ULead Movie Factory and got a slightly better result but still with quite obvious pixelation. Im assuming its the quality of the MPEG2 encoder at fault here as the source AVI is very good. Please can you recommend a better encoder which will give results comparable to professionally bought DVDs or at least better than VHS. Perhaps I need to consider a different editing/burning package - I've found very negative reviews about Videowave. Can you help? (Thanks)

Can you give us an idea what sort of settings you've been using for DVD creation in terms of bitrate, quality and resolution? There are a lot of variables... the type of source video itself being one!

In MGI Videowave there are no options at all in the DVD creation part of the software to show the settings for bitrate, quality and resolution. The menu shows (with the settings I've used),
Create File Set
Standard: PAL,
Region: 2,
Directory: path on pc
Write to Disk
Device: Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-107D
Write Speed 4x
Copies 1
Files location: path on pc
I assume it uses its template for producing MPEG2 from the main part of the software. The properties for this are MPEG2-PAL. Standard format MPEG2 video files.
Video MPEG2 720 x 576 25.00 fps
Audio 48 khz 16 bit Stereo

The ULEAD DVD Movie Factory SE settings for converting AVI to MPEG2 were as follows:
MPEG2 720 x 576 high quality
Field Order A
24 bits
720 x 576 25 fps
Video data rate 4000 kbps
Audio data rate 384 kbps
layer 2 44.1 khz Stereo.

Video Wave produces avi files with the following properties
Video 720 x 576 PAL
Audio 32khz 16 bit Stereo
I assume it captures with the same properties. The camera I am using is a Canon DM XM1. Hope this info helps, apologies for the ineptitude!

It looks like Marc is writing a guide about this, see the relevant section of the forum for that !

If you have any specific questions post them back here maybe I can also give some insight.

Fruey, I've made a start and posted the first part, but I think I've managed to both oversimplfy and totally fail to address the main problems people face. You input would be welcome

__________________

| video editing guides | our videos |
| wedding guides | website hosting |

Just to update.

Tried TMPGenc to encode and much better quality found. Slightly annoying to have to add the extra step into the process. So tried trial version of Video Studio 7. Hurrah! Much much better results - have now ordered this! Many thanks for all the help, Im certainly better informed now than I was. : )

I'll get a bit of time soon, will happily have a better read through and perhaps add a few things from my experience. I don't really do DVD encoding though, no DVD burner :-( but I do a lot of encoding...

Glad to hear that Susie, you found your solution!