Quality of DVD Studio Pro vs iDVD

I have been trying to obtain a DVD output with DVD Studio Pro where moderate speed pans don't jerk. Oddly, I get better results using iDVD. The image in iDVD isn't as sharp, but the quality of movement (pans, tilts) is smoother. My program length is only 20 minutes and I have used compressor to encode outside of DVD SP. The compressor setting was for DVD, 60 mins, best quality. Why is it that a consumer software such as iDVD yields better results in this aspect? What am I doing wrong in DVD SP that results in less than professional results. All input appreciated. Thanks in advance

Hal MacLean wrote:
Wow - wikipedia link is a superb article, but a tad geeky...
That is why I refused to understand it, I am not a geek and no one will convince me otherwise... even if every new application and computer released by Apple is like catnip for me

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DVD Studio pro vs iDVD: DVD Quality?

Do the DVDs made by DVD studio Pro look better than those from iDVD?
I have very good looking HD videos, made in iMovie: which look quite good as QT movies, but quality deteriorates a fair amount when iDVD makes it into a DVD. looking for better DVD product. Will I notice a difference with DVD Studio pro. kinda expensive if doesn't improve quality of final product.
roger

If you use the default compressor built into DVDSP it will probably be very similar to iDVD.
If you buy Final Cut Studio to get DVDSP you will also get an application called Compressor that allows for very high quality HD to DVD compression if you customize the presets.

Quality of DVD Studio Pro using Compressor vs iDVD

Sorry to repeat the question below, which I have also posted under DVD SP...I thought that perhaps someone watching Compressor would also have input.
I have been trying to obtain a DVD output with DVD Studio Pro where moderate speed pans don't jerk. Oddly, I get better results using iDVD. The image in iDVD isn't as sharp, but the quality of movement (pans, tilts) is smoother. My program length is only 20 minutes and I have used compressor to encode outside of DVD SP. The compressor setting was for DVD, 60 mins, best quality. Why is it that a consumer software such as iDVD yields better results in this aspect? What am I doing wrong in DVD SP that results in less than professional results. All input appreciated. Thanks in advance

Pamela
hy is it that a consumer software such as iDVD yields better results in this aspect? What am I doing wrong in DVD SP that results in less than professional results.
You are messing around with Compressor settings . . . I guess!
Hope that helps !
Alberto

Idvd (professional quality) vs DVD Studio pro quality difference

The Short question:
I understand DVDSP gives you much more control on menus on your dvd, but if I'm not concerned about additional controls, and only about preserving video quality, is it worth using DVDSP and possibly compressor or am I getting the same quality on less then one hour dvd's using 'professional quality' encoding with iDVD?
The long question:
I know this has probably been talked about many time, so I apologize.
I'm creating home movies with FCP from SD DV footage. Being Standard definition, I would like to preserve as much quality as I can when putting my movies onto DVD. Most of my movies, as well as DVD's are less then one hour.
I just went through the excellent Lynda.com tutorials on DVD studio pro by Larry Gordon. I understand DVDSP gives you much more control on menus on your dvd, but if I'm not concerned about additional controls, and only about preserving video quality, is it worth using DVDSP and possibly compressor or am I getting the same quality on less then one hour dvd's using 'professional quality' encoding with iDVD?
Thanks for your understanding.

Thanks guys for your reply. After finishing the tutorials on both DVDsp and Compressor. I think I'm sold. The flexibility is worth the extra effort. Actually after learning the interfaces, they aren't as daunting as I first thought. Compressor is dead easy and DVDsp is fun due to the control you have over your dvd. ALSO, using DVDsp over idvd has fixed a VERY annoying aspect ratio issue I have ever since using idvd. Where my DV 16:9 footage is being cropped to 4:3 on certain dvd players. I've battled that issue with no resolution for way too long. No problem when the DVD is made from DVDsp. I will miss the beautiful canned templates supplied in idvd, but I'm sure there are templates for DVDSP I'll be able to find. I'm sure templates are limited due to they expect you to create your own. I can deal with that.
Thanks again.
DVDsp is the way to go!

Compare output quality with DVD Studio Pro 3 and iDVD 08?

Can anyone one tell me if there is a difference in output quality between the new iDVD 08 and DVD Studio Pro 3. I have not bought DVD Studio Pro 4 as it is not available as a separate purchase. I am wondering if I should bother with iDVD 08 if the output is the same or less than Studio 3.
Thanks, Ed

I'll add this. I came to the forum this evening on this very subject. I have been using IDVD for years producing promotional DVD's that have been lauded by all my customers. I recently popped for FCP and DVD-SP to improve the quality of my productions. Yet, here I am, trying to figure out why DVD-SP is delivering terrible artifacts on high speed movement in the video. This is regardless of the settings for the encoder. They're better at the higher settings, but they're still there. Now I think (hope to find a different answer here on the forum) I have to encode with Compressor, re-import the track and re-link all 80 of the chapter links. The same video showed absolutely none of these artifacts when encoded in iDVD. The finished product looked identical to hooking up my miniDV camera to the television. The flexibility of menu construction in DVD-SP is amazing, but Apple needs to scrap the fancy built-in encoder and just use whatever is working in iDVD.

DVD Studio Pro vs iDVD

I have to make a dvd at work - it's just going to be b-roll video with buttons to select different sections of the video. I'm pretty sure we should be using DVD studio pro but my project manager thinks we should use iDVD since it's free. Can anyone fill me in on the major differences between the two?
Thanks!

DVD Studio Pro is worlds more complicated than iDVD, and even though newer versions offer some of the ease-of-use of iDVD, there are many settings you'll have to worry about that just aren't an issue with iDVD. Furthermore, if you're used to AfterEffects, the timeline is probably going to cause you to approach DVD authoring in the same linear fashion as creating video effects, and that will only cause headaches in the future. Most importantly, your Flash/Director experience will probably leave you infinitely frustrated with the limitations of DVD when it comes to creating a "multimedia" interface, because with DVD it's all an illusion. Nothing is loaded into the player beforehand, so everything is a stream, not a routine running on computer hardware that can do several things at once. My best advice is to use iDVD until you need to move forward, or experiment with DVD Studio Pro on your own time until you feel confident enough to do real work with it.
The biggest point I'm trying to make is, to quote Yoda, "You must unlearn what you have learned."

Motion file poor quality in DVD Studio Pro

I'm using a Motion file for my DVD menu. I have double checked to ensure that all of the dimensions are correct, however the quality of the motion file is incredibly poor in DVD studio pro. Is there something that I am missing?

Don't trust the viewer in DVDSP. It's by no means accurate. Plus, since you're adding a Motion project to the DVDSP project, the Motion file needs to be converted to MPEG2 so that it'll play on a DVD. You could be either seeing a preview of a file that's not been converted yet, or else the encoding settings in DVDSP could be set too low.
My recommendation would be to burn a quick DVD and view in on a TV for quality.
Andy

Compression quality: iDVD vs DVD Studio Pro vs others?

I am merrily editing along in FCE, and looking to eventually compress and burn onto DVD. Since I can use all the quality I can get, and don't have spare money (so what else is new?), I am wondering about the differences in compressing software. Is there a visible difference in the final product using DVD Studio Pro vs iDVD? Is there something else out there that is better than iDVD but doesn't cost as much as DVDSP? Any opinions or experience welcomed!
Thank you!

If your project is under an hour, iDVD will give you very satisfactory results (use the Best Performance settings).
You can create an up to 2 hour movie with iDVD but personally (with Best Quality), I think the quality begins to slide off a bit over an hour
DVD Studio Pro, with Compressor, gives you many more compression options. Compressor has lots more compression pre-sets and you can go in and tweak bit rates, single or double passes, etc. You can do that inside DVD Studio Pro as well. Overall, Studio Pro just gives you a lot more options and control.
Roxio Toast is a relatively cheap (around 80 bucks Cdn) piece of software that will compress your FC movies. You are way limited in terms of things like menus and chapters but compression wise it does a fairly nice job ... again, you don't have the versatility of iDVD. With Popcorn, it will allow you to cram a big movie onto a single layer DVD but the quality begins to hurt
Personally, no matter what you use, two hours is the reasonable quality limit for a single layer DVD

IDVD vs DVD Studio Pro

Please help! I've heard talk that it's better to burn DVDs using DVD Studio Pro than iDVD? Is that true?
I'm asking because I worked on a project that was distributed to over 200 people. Out of those 200 discs, about 30 of them were returned because they skipped, restarted or just didn't play on some DVD players.
I've gone back to the drawing board and made the following changes using iDVD before burning more copies of my project:
1) Purchased Taiyo Yuden 8x discs
2) Changed the burning speed to 1x
3) Changed burning option from Pro Quality to Best Performance
I've also heard that the reason High or Pro Quality isn't a good choice for burned discs to play on standard DVD players is because the Mac burns the disc at too high of a bitrate. Is this true? Either way, should I worry about iDVD not producing a good quality disc vs using DVD Studio Pro?
Help!!!!

hey there Luis,
i doubt that iDVD was the problem since 85% of your DVDs worked. it could be that some of the players were to old to play they type of discs burned. some older DVD players may not like any flavor of recordable DVD, some just may not like DVD+R, preferring the older DVD-R standard. i've used iDVD since iLife 03 & had 3 that wouldn't work on customers players, but that got resolved with customers getting newer players made since 2003/2004. w/out knowing your individual customers DVD players, you may not not hit 100% compatibility.
DVD SP is a much more complicated app than iDVD, but they essentially do the same thing-allow the user to author & burn movies & photo slide shows to recordable DVD media. DVD SP allows for more interactivity & more types of content to be applied in authoring a DVD, such as a game or web site-like "Harry Potter & Sorcerer's Stone" DVD, as such it is more difficult for novices. it has a pretty steep learning curve just like Apple's other Pro Apps & is only available w/ FCS1 or FCS2, also pretty expensive.

FCE 4 And DVD Studio Pro

What versions of DVD Studio Pro work with FCE 4? My version of FCP has been rendered useless because of upgrading to Leopard, I had to have the iphone! I prefer to stick with DVD Studio Pro over iDVD.
Thanks in advance!

Any version of DVDSP will work with FCE4. It's a standalone application, though it's no longer available outside of Final Cut Studio. It comes with Compressor, its own compression application.

Quality issues in iDVD - is DVD Studio Pro the answer?

Hi all,
I am having a problem producing a high quality DVD with iDVD. I know this is the DVD studio forum but I am wondering if I need to switch form iDVD to get the results I want. So, this is what I am doing in iDVD.
I am using 13 QT (.mov) movie files that were made using the "Best" quality setting. Their size is 720 X 480. I am using the "Professional Quality" encoding in the Preference dialog and the Project settings dialog. The theme I am using is Revolution. (This is all in iDVD)
I have burned a few DVDs (Memorex DVD+RW, 4X) and at first used the "Best Performance" encoding. It took about 20 min to burn the DVD. The results were too pixelated. Then I read about the other settings, and used the "Professional Quality". This higher setting took over 40 min to burn the DVD. Unfortunately,the results were not that much better.
Can someone help me to figure out what is wrong? I am looking to produce the crisp quality I see when I view the QT movie files (before I incorporated them into my iDVD project).
What I am thinking is that iDVD is not capable of producing the high crisp quality I am looking for and that DVD Studio Pro might be my answer. Or, could it be my QT movie files (thou they look great when I just play them on my computer in the QT player.
Thanks
PS: I posted a similar topic in the iDVD forum but no answers as of yet and I am on a strict deadline (aren't we all...lol)

You didn't mention that you were doing screen captures. That makes a difference. Camtasia is compressing your screen captures. All DVDs use MPEG-2 compression. So you are in fact double compressing your videos (which always results is lower quality).
To get better results see if you can get Camtasia to record uncompressed, or using the Animation codec at Best. This will result in a absolutely huge file, which is what you want. You bring that into iDVD for good results. Or bring it into Compressor and then DVD SP for better results. Or a third party MPEG-2 encoder like BitVice and then DVD SP for best results. Of course using anything other than iDVD will require a couple of weeks training.

How Do I Use DVD Studio Pro Files In iDVD?

I had somebody create a DVD for me using DVD Studio Pro. (This was a compilation of many different videos.) It turned out great.
I now want to make a DVD of one of those videos on my own using iDVD '08.
I have the raw video/audio files. But, my problem is the raw files that were used for the DVD Studio Pro project are separated into one video file and one audio file. I don't know how I can get them both into iDVD. I was told that I have to recombine these two files into one file. But, how do I do this and still maintain the best quality?
(I am not a video expert by any means, but I can tell you that the video file is a ".mpeg" and the audio file is an ".ac3". When looking at the .mpeg file in the finder it lists its Kind as "MPEG Movie" and when looking at the .ac3 file in the finder it lists its Kind as "Unix Executable File".)
(I'm using iDVD 7.0.1 - I do have Quicktime Pro - I do not have the Quicktime MPEG-2 Playback component - I do not have DVD Studio Pro)
Thanks in advance for your help!

Q: How Do I Use DVD Studio Pro Files In iDVD?
A: You don't, essentially.
DVDSP is apple's top end app and it is intended to be used with FCP > Compressor > DVDSP. All of these are pro apps.
i-Apps are consumer apps all of which are QT based. With that in mind ....
now that doesn't mean you can't use FCP > iDvd. You can. But you have to do it in a way that iDvd will read all the files (meaning you must think in terms of QuickTime and export in this way). So when you export your QT File / Movie from FCP over to iDvd, it will look something like this hopefully regardless of the raw image & audio files you have already compiled which unfortunately will NOT work with i-Apps BUT will work with apple's pro apps which is the intended workflow / direction of said files in the first place.
Btw ... if your QT movie has chapter markers then please use the following settings so iDvd can read these markers. (if on the other hand you were looking to export this file to DVDSP; then you would choose DVDSP Markers.
Let me know if the above helps. If not, just come on back.

Is DVD Studio Pro faster than iDVD?

Sorry I'm double posting this but I didn't get my question in the Subject line. Is DVDSP faster than iDVD? If so, by how much? I'm on the endless quest for more speed.

I have a feeling you're asking about the time to compress video, in which case it will depend on the settings you've chosen. As a rough guestimate I would say that iDVD will compress as fast as the faster possibilities in DVD Studio Pro (which is using Compressor behind the scenes). Using Compressor would allow you to more carefully get the best quality for a given amount of video, instead of iDVD's one hour or two hour approach.
Usually though you would tend to compress the video before taking it into DVD Studio Pro, and you wouldn't need to compress it again before doing a build or burning a disc.
If you meant is DVD Studio Pro faster to create a title, it varies depending on what the disc needs to do. The important thing is that there are things you just cannot do in iDVD, and if you need to do those you could use DVD Studio Pro to do them.

H.264 in SD on iDVD vs. DVD Studio Pro

I am trying to get DVCAM video shot 16:9 and edited in FCP onto a SD dvd and have it look good. Regular NTSC QT file looks like garbage, and is a huge file. H.264 looks great and takes up less space. I can get the H.264 into iDVD no problem, but not into a SD project in DVD Studio Pro. Anybody have a workaround, or is it really as it seems that iDVD is superior to the "pro" app?

Video DVDs ONLY use MPEG-2 for their video. If you take your video, then compress it to H.264 and bring it into iDVD or DVD SP. It is then compressed again into MPEG-2 behind the scenes. If you double compress your video, there will be a noticeable loss in quality. Its like photo copying a photo copy.
The solution is to export a QuickTime movie out of FCP using the same codec that you edited in. Bring that into Compressor. Export out a .m2v for your video and a .ac3 for your audio. Bring those into DVD SP for authoring.
MPEG-2 encoding is more of an art than a science. So you will want to start with one of the presets in Compressor and then tweak it to get the best results.

DVD STUDIO PRO 4 TEMPLATES QUALITY

Is there anyone out there that uses DVD Studio Pro 4 without problems. When using the templates both the text and stills are grainy or pixelated. As a test I created a movie and stills in FCP imported them into DVDSP, the movie quality superb, the text and stills for the menus - rubbish. I then used the same content in iDVD - perfect menus. It is really annoying when you invest in Pro software and the results aren't as good as you get with a freebie!
Is there something obvious I am doing wrong?

fairpaul wrote:
Is there anyone out there that uses DVD Studio Pro 4 without problems. When using the templates both the text and stills are grainy or pixelated. As a test I created a movie and stills in FCP imported them into DVDSP, the movie quality superb, the text and stills for the menus - rubbish. I then used the same content in iDVD - perfect menus. It is really annoying when you invest in Pro software and the results aren't as good as you get with a freebie!
Is there something obvious I am doing wrong?
Can't tell from your post if you're looking at your DVDSP project on your Mac or you have finished the project, burned the DVD, and are watching it on a tv set top box.
To answer your first question, yes, I have no such issues with DVDSP4, I use some of the templates but not many, I usually change the typefaces, though. I have never used iDVD so I can't tell you if the results are superior in that product.
bogiesan

Quality of DVD Studio Pro vs iDVD

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