HD Video to DVD Encode Issue

Hello, Sorry if this has been covered but I can't seem to find the answer, anywhere on the net. I have shot 4 small corporate productions with an Epic, looks great. Cut it, colored, sound, etc. I have the finals outputted in masters for web and BluRay, fine. Client wants SD DVD's for trade shows and their clients who do not have BluRay players so she wants DVD's. I have tried everything to get a clean DVD. They look terrible. I understand that HD does not work on SD DVD but can I not at least get the picture to look like a DVD? Meaning clean and the way DVD's looked before HD? I am getting pixelation and just ugliness.

I have tried Compressor and DVD Studio Pro from my FCP7. I have tried output from FCPX. I have tried Encore and it just crashes on my now thanks I guess to Mavericks. I purchased Toast Titanium 11, worked different settings and still no good. What in the world can I do to make a DVD look right? Is there some special set of settings I do not know nor can I find? It baffles me that old SD video to DVD looks better than HD to DVD. I've been two days on this trying to make simple DVD's. My masters are ProRes 422 .mov. I really wish someone could simply state what settings to use. I have read everything under the sun with a whole lot of different answers. I now have a sizable stack DVD coasters.

Any help would be saving me right now.

When you say you have tried output from FCPX, do you mean you have selected the timeline and chose Share and then DVD to create a very basic one pass encoded DVD? No other intermediate steps are required and FCPX should properly encode your HD project to a standard def DVD. While this will not look as high resolution as a blu-ray it should still be quite acceptable as a standard def DVD. If this still looks horrible, try the following:

With your project active in the timeline, choose share Master File. Then either using Compressor or DVD Studio Pro, import the Master File as an asset and use these typical decent quality settings:
MultiPass VBR Best, Variable Bit Rate 7.5 Mbps min 8.5 Mbps maximum and check to see if you can fit all your footage onto a single layer SD DVD. You say you have short projects so I assume they are well under 1 hour in length.

If all of the DVD programs you have tried yield bad results and some are crashing your computer perhaps there is a problem other than with the applications. Try logging in as a new user and attempt another DVD within FCPX. Are you using an external DVD recorder and is it the same one you used to burn a successful Blu-Ray disc? Can you take a screen grab of what the SD DVD playback looks like?

Making DVDs via FCPX looks great from HD projects, but if you are crashing at every turn that's not a help.

What effects are you using? Are there any that aren't compatible with the version of X you are running?

Can you export a master file without crashing? If so you can make a new project and share that to DVD and see if that crashes as well. If it does, you may have a preference issue or a hardware problem that needs to be sorted out.

If you do manage to burn a DVD, you can save a disk image to your drive and use that to mass produce copies in toast. Much quicker than doing them one by one in X.

Good luck and let me know what happens.

Depends on what you mean by "ugly." Since you are probably making 16x9 1080p masters, make sure you are mastering anamorphic DVDs (16x9) so that you use all of the 720x480 resolution of SD. Do you really think that Compressor's default DVD presets are that terrible? It's set at 5-7.5 Mb/sec which is a "normal" range that's compatible with almost every DVD player out there. Granted, it's not the BEST compression for DVD ever, but it's "good enough" especially for corporate work.

The other thing to make sure of is that you don't have something weird going on with your master like having interlacing or pulldown (you can master 23.976 progressive DVDs, so no need for pulldown). I'm just guessing about your framerate and master settings, though.

You should post a screenshot of what you consider to be your ugly compression, and we'd be able to tell you if you're expecting too much from SD DVDs. But in general there's pretty much no way you can shoot SD that's better looking than Epic HD reduced to SD.

Thank you for the help. To answer your questions in order:
Yes I selected TL in X. I'm not expecting HD quality but I also don't want pixelation. It should at least look clean.

I will try your settings for Comp/DVD SP.

I am recording to internal drive on my MBP 2010.

I used an external BluRay burner for the BRs.

I'll try the screen grab from MBP. I've been playing them on DVD player into an HDTV in living room for testing. Thanks again.

The only thing that was crashing was Encore CS5. Everything else works. Some effects and two of the productions are chroma keys. Thanks for your help.

Apparently my screen Grab and keyboard shortcut cmd/sft 3 and 4 do not work anymore, again Mavericks? The images are all grey. I a going to work the solutions all of you provided. Deadline man. Thank you all. This is the best site for information by far. I can't thank you all enough.

marsmock wrote: Apparently my screen Grab and keyboard shortcut cmd/sft 3 and 4 do not work anymore, again Mavericks? The images are all grey. I a going to work the solutions all of you provided. Deadline man. Thank you all. This is the best site for information by far. I can't thank you all enough.

Are you trying to do this in DVD player? If I recall that is blocked by apple. If you open the disc in VLC player it will work. Make sure the playback window is set to actual size.