I'm trying to make a DVD from some HD movies I've made from an AVCHD camera shot in 1080p30. I'm on Ubuntu 9.04 - 64, Kdenlive 0.7.6. My HD renders look great, but I'm having trouble getting good DVD format files.

I'm using the stock preset called "NTSC 16:9 VOB 2 pass" which looks like this:

f=dvd vcodec=mpeg2video acodec=ac3 s=720x480 b=6000k maxrate=9000k minrate=0 bufsize=1835008 mux_packet_s=2048 mux_rate=10080000 ab=192k ar=48000 g=18 me_range=63 trellis=1 profile=dv_ntsc_wide pass=2

A 23 minute video came out at just about 1.0GB, which seems about the right amount of data for a high quality DVD file, so the bitrate seems okay.

The results just look pretty bad. The color and sound and framerate look okay, but there's a lot of artifacting especially in noisy jagged vertical or diagonal lines that I just don't see when watching a well made DVD. It's noticeable even when viewed 1:1 zoom, and just awful on a high def fullscreen playback. I'm not expecting HD quality, but this is like bad old VHS.

Any suggestions on what I'm doing wrong? Is there some kind of anti-alias or resize filter or something that could fix this? Is the 30p framerate posing some problem?

I've had to go with Avidemux to make mpeg files for DVDs. Just can't get decent quality out of a Kdenlive render.

Anyone?

Unfortunately my work flow is Windows Movie Maker for final rendering. I would like to use Kdenlive but the crashes and poor quality makes that impossible at this time, maybe with Kdenlive 1.0+.

Windows Movie Maker output for DVD's is very good.

I just rendered a 720p video to "NTSC 16:9 VOB 2 pass" format and it looks quite good to me. However I am using the latest svn ffmpeg and the latest svn kdenlive.

We welcome help with users tuning these themselves perhaps with info gleamed from the Internet and other tools like Handbrake. Then, you can upload your render profile to this website and maybe they will get merged into releases.