Premiere Elements DVD looks awful

Question

Hello,
I am trying to make computer tutorial videos both available on DVD and on the web. I am only on the DVD part so far and having major trouble. Here is what I am trying to do
Creating screen captures using CamStudio I have tried setting the value to 100 for quality and changed to the FPS to 29.97 and 33. The screen I am recording is at 800 x 600 resolution setting in a VMWare window. I capture the video and it looks great until I pull it into Premiere.
I dont know what preset to select as none of them apply since non of them have the 800 x 600 resolution as an option. ACHVD 720p30 lite is the current setting it is on.
I bring it into Premiere and I start to have weird video problems. If I use the lossless CamStudio codec i get a black box in premiere where the cursor should be. If I view this video outside of premier I do not have this problem. If I use the Microsoft Codec  I do not experience this issue.
I put 3 videos with different variations of the original codec  FPS. one at 29.97 another at 33 fps using the microsoft codec then the final one at 33 fps using the lossless codec. In preview it looked good, once it was burned it was fuzzy, jumping and horrible.
How do I fix this ? Also how can I reduce the AVI file size without killing the quality. I want to have a nice clean presentable video. Please help I am new to screen recording and dvd authoring. I bought Premiere just for this purpose.

Answer 1

Many people assume that if they make an original video at a high defition, when they make a low resolution DVD of it, this will somehow give superior results.
Unfortunately the opposite is usually the case. You never get as good results, given all other things being equal, unless other factors like the camera lens and pickup device are much superior to the old standard camera as well.
One factor is because high definition cameras don't have the same "depth of modulation" or sharpness as low resolution cameras at the critical point which represents the upper resolution limit of DVD. They don't need to be extra sharp at lower pixel rates because they show finer piuxels to compensate.
You always have to unnaturally slightly pre-sharpen HD material before burning to lower resolution DVD to allow for this.
Consider the following for an old 4x3 NTSC standard video DVD made from 800x800, (the same principle applies to anywhere where the original isn't the same as the end product)
Only every 4th 640 pixel will coincide with about each 6th 800 pixel. All the others in between have to be arrived at by a mixture of the intervening pixels.
The software can only guess when the new pixel values should be in between from the trend or average of the original HD pixels. This sometimes gives horrible results up to one quarter of the resolution depending on the nature of some small parts of the screen.
If you haven't got a very fast computer and video card you will get jumpiness as well as it cant keep up to what is necessary to convert.
The best DVD or Blue ray results are usually made with the camera set to the exactly the same pixels as the final product.
Eg 640x480i for 3x4 standard NTSC, 1920x1080i for widescreen Blue Ray
This applies also to stills from still camera. These must be downgraded (to 640x480 or 1920x1080 in the above example) and re-sharpened if necessary with Photoshop so you see exactly how bad they will be before importing to the editor.
Downgrading to a pixel value slightly higher than the final product usually gives the worst quality of all because they are eventually being downgraded twice.
Basically, video editors are NOT designed to be video converters so any attempt to use them for this will give much poorer results.