DVD quality with DVD SP

Question

I have been using iDVD to produce DVDs and would be interested in using DVD SP if the quality of visual playback for single sided DVDs over one hour in length (or dual layer DVDs longer than two hours) was significantly better than with iDVD.
With iDVD scenes with rapid motion are significantly degraded when producing DVDs over one hour in length. Does the compression used with DVD SP produce less artifacts with longer times?
Thanks,
Jim

Answer 1

Hi James:
You have more control over the final result of your finished disc in every way possible when comparing DVD Studio Pro to iDVD.
DVDSP bridges an interesting gap between what iDVD is - an easy application for drag and drop DVD creation - and what high-end DVD authoring applications like Sonic Scenarist (what most Hollywood feature films are authored on) are.
If you're using DVDSP at the "drag and drop" level, you are using the application presets for encoding your video to MPEG2 (the format that it must be in prior to being multiplexed - or "muxed"). This image quality is, well, "goodish".
For better picture quality results, you'll want to encode your source video to MPEG2 prior to importing it into DVDSP.
Compressor, the application that ships with DVDSP and/or Final Cut Pro Studio (is DVDSP still available as a stand alone product?) for transcoding digital video has very good presets for MPEG2.
There are several other Mac based products for encoding MPEG2 for DVD authoring (Autodesk Cleaner, Flip4Mac Episode, etc.); however, these all use QuickTime under the hood. When it comes to software encoding it's really a question of what level of control that an application gives you over the numerous settings when you want to tweak the presets. That, or, which application has the best presets.
If a DVD-Video disc is disctributed by a major studio, the picture is typically hardware encoded to MPEG2 (often with the Sonic SD2000 board - about $25,000.00 - but there are others) from Digital Betacam video tape.
While there's still some debate over this, a software encoded stream can look just as good as a hardware encoded stream. For years, the difference has been which one gets the job done faster. A PowerMac G4/400 can encode 10 minutes of DV-NTSC footage at Compressor's "best" settings in about four hours while a PowerMac Dual G5/2.0GHz can encode the same source at the same setting in seven minutes while a MacPro Dual/3.0 Duo Core can finish in thee minutes. Hardware encoding, by contrast, is the run time of the video (actaully, three times the run time of the video allowing for an analysis of the picture, encoding of the picture, then encoding of the audio). And, of course, you have to start with good picture quality to begin with.
If nothing else, it's worth learning DVDSP just to have direct control of the button flow on your DVD menus.
Hope this helps.
-Warren