I appear to have a problem with quality. I have a Sony PC110E camcorder which still shoots good quality video. I capture this as avi in Ulead VS9, then I output to MPEG2 and burn to DVD. It appears that during the rendering or the burning process I lose a bit of quality. The finished product appears a little grainy and dark. Is it worth playing with any of the following to increase quality -

MPEG compression
Video Data Rate
Frame Rate
Frame Size

What if I outputted to an uncompressed format like AVI first, then burned to DVD, would this make any difference?
Many thanks

Fuzzy.

You should only lose a very small amount in the encoding process as long as certain things are taken into consideration.

framerate and frame size are fixed in DVD, but the datarate/bitrate makes a big difference. The higher the bitrate the smoother and clearer the DVD file. Try increasing the bitrate, 6000 or better should give high quality.

Another thing is that not all encoders are equal so you can encode 2 videos using different apps to the same settings and they won't necessarily look the same. I don't know how the ulead plug in compares to others.

You could as you say output to avi and then use an app like TMPGenc to convert to DVD.

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Edius Pro, ADVC300