Getting the best DVD from AVCHD

JimVBrook

Newbie Location: Auckland, New Zealand Joined: Sep 16, 2008 13:54 Messages: 18 Offline

Solved by

Jul 06, 2009 20:39

I have a Canon HF10 camera which produces high quality AVCHD files. If in PowerDirector 7 I create a HQ DVD from these, the result is far from impressive... there's a blurriness and also some visible "lining" at the edge of shapes.

I then converted the same m2ts files to MPG using Cyberlink MediaShow Expresso (a very nice product). The result was mpg files of the same excellent quality as the original. Using another product I was able to produce DVDs of a better quality, but still not not what I think should be possible.

I know there is going to be some loss during the conversion to lower bit-rate VOB files, but the losses I am experiencing are far greater than I would believe necessary. And if I convert the mpg files to wmv at even 1500bps the results are much better than the VOB.

Therefore I would really appreciate any suggestions as to how to get the best quality DVD image from the AVCHD files.

Thank you for any help

Jim Brook

Alextzi

Newbie Joined: Mar 11, 2009 15:17 Messages: 47 Offline

Jul 07, 2009 01:15

So to play in a regular DVD player, you have to use DVD format. The highest quality is 8 Megabits per second and it is standard definition.

IF you have a Blu ray player, you can burn your project to an AVCHD DVD (ie, a DVD that has AVCHD files on it). here you can select higher quality such as 1920 x 1080 (I would use the max bitrate pd7 allows which is 14800 kbps), these will be HD files. Now most bluray players can play an AVCHD DVD, but not all. Sony and panasonic blu rays can play AVCHD for sure.

Finally, the renderer in PD7 is not great. What I do is make my movies in PD7, then produce a high quality AVCHD file, then import to Nero 9 and burn the DVD from there. The renderer/transcoder in Nero 9 is excellent (although a bit slower).

hope that helps....

Alex

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at Jul 07. 2009 01:17

pjc

Senior Member Location: Aus Joined: Sep 12, 2008 03:48 Messages: 262 Offline

Jul 07, 2009 05:24

Quote:
Therefore I would really appreciate any suggestions as to how to get the best quality DVD image from the AVCHD files.

Hi Jim,

I use a Canon and a Pana AVCHD. I totally agree both AVCHD rendering and Mpeg2 SD(DVD) rendering is poor with PD. Unlike Alex I render my files to BD profile (Mpeg2 1080i) and then use third party software to render to DVD. This is very annoying I know

JimVBrook

Newbie Location: Auckland, New Zealand Joined: Sep 16, 2008 13:54 Messages: 18 Offline

Jul 07, 2009 05:29

Thanks Alex. Your post is helpful in that it confirms what I have found - the need to use an alternative to PowerDirector for ordinary (non Blue-Ray) DVD production.

I don't have Nero 9. I do have Nero 8 and it doesn't do much better than PD for this task. However another program I have, VideoReDo, does much better, although still not as good as I think should be possible. VideoReDo does, like you mention with Nero 9, take very much longer to do its work, presumably because it's working harder to achieve accuracy. (I should mention here that VideoReDo only operates on MPG, so, like pjc, I've got to convert from AVCHD to mpg first.)

While there are many reasons to praise PD, it is hard for me to understand why Cyberlink would not want every aspect of it to be as good as possible, and the need to produce old-type DVDs from AVCHD seems to me to be a fairly basic requirement at the present time.

Thanks again.

Jim.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Jul 07. 2009 13:31

James W

Senior Contributor Location: Lakeland, FL USA Joined: Aug 18, 2008 10:36 Messages: 911 Offline

Jul 07, 2009 07:53

Hi Jim,

There are also some free applications you can find which are based on the ffmpeg encoder which are better than PD. Unfortunately, these programs are not easy to use and require text syntax to set the rendering parameters.

I normally do as pjc suggested and render using the MPEG2 BD profile for saving my work in high quality. For DVD's I just decided to use the DVD HQ setting. I realize that better options are available, but the DVD format is on its way out (my belief) and soon this issue may be a moot point. I don't want to spend the money for a better DVD rendering engine that may soon not be needed. Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT

Kent

Newbie Joined: Jul 07, 2008 10:48 Messages: 5 Offline

Jul 11, 2009 09:28

On 5/21/09 Dafydd Bevan stated that the fix would be in the next patch.

Patch 3017 came out on 6/24/09 & as far as I can tell, the AVCHD rendering issue has not been fixed in this patch.

Does anyone have an update?