U-Lead Video Studio v8 advice needed.

[signormeek 0]

Does anyone out there use U-Lead video studio 8 to edit DV recordings? I had one recently that I did for a friend and the result when I got it on DVD was that the picture looked great until the camera moved and then the image broke up into regular square shapes before settling back to a regular image of the subject - as the camera stayed still.
Am I doing something wrong or was the camera at fault? It wasn't my camera (or tape) and other stuff I did came out fine. I was putting a friends videos onto a composite DVD for him.
Any advice appreciated - advice about u-lead video editor that is!

[blazetailman 0]

It sounds like you have the video quality at low and when the camera moves you are just seeing the high amount of compression.

Burn another one and double check the output setting and make sure it is at high quality.

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[WrongWay 0]

I think you just need to use a different editor.

Besides that....that's weird as hell.

Maybe it's the fault of the CD being scratched or an error during the burning process?

Wrong Way
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[psuCory 0]

1) What are you testing your burned disks on?

Try the DVD on another player (or your computer - Windows Media Player will play it) and see if the same results occur.

2) What media (DVD+R(W) DVD-R(W)) are you using?

I've had mixed results with DVDs burned from VS8. Burning to DVD+R media produces disks that I can play on my home DVD player and computer, but other peoples players seem to dislike it. When I say they dislike it, I mean that the pixilation effect happens on some, and others can't read the disk at all.

Burning to DVD-R media results in disks playable on my machines, and others without issue.

Remember, some players prefer one type over the other. A second issue (I think this is the case with my +R disks) is that some blank disks are of a poor quality. I bought a spindle of HP brand +R disks that I think might be low quality, resulting in poor burns.

3) What mode are you using when capturing?
I'm not in front of my home machine, but if memory serves there are a few options for capture. One of them is best suited for DVD output the other is meant for online (WMV?) format.

4) When publishing/burning, what quality option did you choose? I usually burn at the highest quality (lowest compression) offered, because space is not that limited. If you chose the highest compression, I would think that some pixiliation would be evident.

[dorbie 0]

Quote

I think you just need to use a different editor.

Besides that....that's weird as hell.

Not really most of not all popular video codecs are based on spatial blocks of data, when the data rate can't represent all the information in the video you start to see block noise, i.e. the high frequency information needed to make adjacent blocks merge into eachother tends to get dropped leaving visible blocks of color or visible edges in a block structure. The more motion and changing information in the video the greater the required data rate for good picture quality. When the video stops changing (the camera & picture stops moving) even with a slow data rate a codec can 'catch up' and fill in the high frequency information.

All sorts of stuff can cause this at many points in your workflow, a crappy codec, poor codec encoding w.r.t. motion vectors etc, low quality settings, connection integrity, data corruption, but when shit happens it's likely you'll see blockiness. Figuring out why is another story.

P.S. it's definitely true that even with the same codec the quality of the compression software matters a lot. There's a lot of on the fly analysis with video that goes into encoding it well, one software product will not perform the same as another even at the same data rate, there's a real art to encoding video well. Decoding is pretty much set (although again if there isn't enough horsepower to decode shortcuts can be made but that's purely a performance/optimization issue).

[hipgnosis 0]

I've played around with U-Lead 7 and found that they really suck doing the encoding for DVD.

I highly recommend you spend $100 and get a copy of Adobe Premier Elements - much better program and much better output.

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

I've played around with U-Lead 7 and found that they really suck doing the encoding for DVD.

Does it do anything well? In general I liked Ulead products for striking a nice balance of feature set and usability. I have UL 8 and Premiere 6.5 to play with to start to make sense of lots of video footage I've gotten since taking a camcorder on vacation.