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IDVD quality question

post #1 of 7
5/2/06 at 4:19pm
Thread Starter 
Hi, I just purchased a canon s2is digicam that takes pretty high quality avi's, I have found that if I drag the files straight to a dvd menu in idvd that it works, very easy way to tranfer my movies to dvd. However I want to ensure they are being transfered at the highest quality possible....can anyone comment on the quality of idvd compared to others for this process.

thanks Scott
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post #2 of 7
5/4/06 at 12:14am
the iApps use "dv" as compressor (because they are meant to work with miniDV camcorders, not still-cams with some moving image recording abilities) , highest possible quality on consumer level... your camera uses an old PC container (avi) and, my guess, some mpeg flavor... mpegs are lossy compressors, a playback only format and need to be processed/converted to create a videoDVD... that process is lossy..

if it works for you, stay with that workflow. can not imagine, you can "add" quality with other tools...
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post #3 of 7
5/4/06 at 3:04am
Thread Starter 
yeah...my camera uses motion jpegs, you would be amazed at the quality though,I have been trying different ways to encode the high quality avi's from the canon s2 is ...and although it is easy to just drop them in idvd and burn, I found that the noise level increased substantially, so here is a long route to

almost lossless transfer of your movies.


open quicktime pro and export your avi's to animation, this will give you a large mov file.

open up compressor and select highest quallity 60min, this will give you an mpg2 file

finally import this to you dvd studio, make a menu and burn.

I am still hoping to find a better way but at least I found one way
I never realized how bad mpeg2 was til I started messing with this.
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post #4 of 7
5/4/06 at 3:13am
Thread Starter 
BTW if anyone knows of a faster lossless codec other than animation I could convert my file to it might make this process alot easier....the whole idea of recording video straight to a memory card is great, but we live in a dvd world so I definitely will be transfering at least some of my videos that way.

BTW in my experimentation I exported my avi to h.264 with quicktime pro....it took forever but I could not tell the difference from the original.....very cool codec if they can get the speed up.
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post #5 of 7
5/4/06 at 3:34am
Have you tried ffmpegX?

I have not used it for making Mpeg2 for DVD but it says it can. If it can read your source files you might be able to go straight to Mpeg2 in one step.
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post #6 of 7
5/4/06 at 3:39am
Why are you encoding to another codec before compressing to DVD? The most lossless way is to encode directly from the source. Can't you drop the mjpeg into Compressor and export to DVD?

On the subject of lossless compression, I tried loads of codecs to see which was the best for storing computer generated images and I tried all sorts including DV, mjpeg etc and there were only two codecs out of all the quicktime ones that didn't produce flickering: animation and pixlet. I actually opted for pixlet because it saves more space. The only problem I have is that FCP has a hard time converting it.
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post #7 of 7
5/4/06 at 12:24pm
Thread Starter 
well I think because of the way this avi is made that the direct to mpeg2 route has a hard time with it...it is basically taking 30 jpeg stills a second and runs them progressively...really nice quality but then the mpeg2 codec seems to introduce either flicker or dotcrawl? on horizontal lines...the output to animation seemed to solve this, I bet I can still find the right codec to make this a one step process but just have not yet. I will try the program mentioned above also....compressor has lots of filters you can apply but none of them seem to address this particular issue...I guess because it is reaaly the first time that this
kind of video has been high enough quality to consider .

I would put the quality of the video just a notch below the minidv format and far above the 8mm format....and really it is better than my minidv tr9..but that camera has its own set of problems anyway
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