Toast Titanium 8 settings

April 30, 2007 3:23 AM

I'm creating a DVD Video for my family using Toast Titanium 8. I wonder what the best encoding settings for my case are.

Of course I can go for all the automatic settings, but I wonder if there are benefits in (un)checking Half-PEL, adjusting Reencoding (Always?) and Field Dominance (Progressive?). The source material are MPEG-2 clips, 720 x 576, 25 fps (PAL), taken from mostly old super 8 movies. The family disc will be a standard PAL 25 fps DVD (4:3) thas are not important, as there is no audio. But can I increase the average t should play well on as many DVD players as possible. Audio settingbit rate, which defaults at 4.0 Mbps?? I especially wonder about all of this, because the MPEG-2 clips can't be played by QuickTime Pro on my Mac. However, VisualHub and Toast can. Converting to DV using VisualHub gave me ugly horizontal artifacts, so does that call for progressive field dominance? Thanks for any insights!

posted by hz37 to technology (4 comments total)

Sorry about the text, no idea why it came out so bad:

Of course I can go for all the automatic settings, but I wonder if there are benefits in (un)checking Half-PEL, adjusting Reencoding (Always?) and Field Dominance (Progressive?). The source material are MPEG-2 clips, 720 x 576, 25 fps (PAL), taken from mostly old super 8 movies. The family disc will be a standard PAL 25 fps DVD (4:3) that should play well on as many DVD players as possible. Audio settings are not important, as there is no audio. But can I increase the average bit rate, which defaults at 4.0 Mbps?? I especially wonder about all of this, because the MPEG-2 clips can't be played by QuickTime Pro on my Mac. However, VisualHub and Toast can. Converting to DV using VisualHub gave me ugly horizontal artifacts, so does that call for progressive field dominance? Thanks for any insights!
posted by hz37 at 3:28 AM on April 30, 2007

If the source material is MPEG-2 already, ideally you do not want to re-encode it at all.

MPEG-2 is a lossy format, and every time you re-encode it, stuff gets lost and quality gets degraded. (It's the old photocopy-of-a-photocopy effect.) There are some exceptions, but in general you just don't want to mess with it unless you need to.

I would leave everything set to full Auto, and see how the output looks (burn a DVD-RW) on a good monitor or TV set.

Specifically, in Toast, I would try to make sure re-encoding was OFF (which ought to disable half-PEL, since that's part of the motion estimation that's only required if you're reencoding) and that it's doing nothing but building the logical structure required for the DVDs. Assuming your MPEG-2 files are in the bit-rate range for the DVD spec, the burning program should basically just rename and copy them as-is to the disc.

Also, probably the best way to play MPEG-2 clips (without buying the Apple Quicktime MPEG-2 Decompression plugin, worth it if you're going to do this more than once) is to use VLC.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:12 AM on April 30, 2007

A lot depends on the exact source format (I know you said Super-8, but it must have been digitised into something suitable for Toast - DV, perhaps?) and its parameters.

Half-PEL always helps quality, at a slight (in the case of MPEG-2) increase in necessary bitrate. PAL DVD video is always stored interlaced (regardless of source - film or video; in the case of film it's stored as 2 equivalent interlaced frames) & Top Field First (yes, PAL is BFF, but it's stored as TFF); any "progressive" output is done purely by the decoder chipset.

Optimum bitrate depends on a few things, primarily source quality (noisy source requires a higher bitrate) and how much you want to fit on a disc. 5~6Mbps is a good average for most stuff; maybe higher if the source is noisier. Really, it's a matter of using your eyes to determine if the quality vs time tradeoff is acceptable.

If you really want to ensure player compatability, consider using an audio track (for historical reasons, .mp2 is slightly more compatible with PAL players than AC3) - some players, particularly older & higher-end ones, will not play discs without an audio track. For the same reason, stick to 112kbps .mp2 - some older players don't like lower bitrates.
posted by Pinback at 7:21 AM on April 30, 2007

Encoding, well, it looks like toast has a VBR (whether it's one pass or two, it's hard to say.) If it's under an hour of of video, definitely jack it up to 7Mbs. They've left enough padding in there with the audio, that a DVD authored this way ought to play on most DVD players. (The 4mb rate is for the video, not the audio. A number like 224 or 256 is great, but if you have no audio, you can drop that rate.)

Reencoding: you'll never get something 'better' than the original encode. Probably best left to never.

Enable half-PEL; it's a setting to modify the motion estimation (half PEL is to look for movement of half a PixEL). It'll slow down encoding.

PAL items (where you are), are always upper field....except in DV, lower field. It's interlaced footage, so keep it that way.

MPEG-2 Clips can absolutely be played by your mac; but apple will only let you play them by paying for the MPEG-2 Codec (which I think has to do with licensing.) That being the case, VLC player should handle them just fine.

Oh, and no matter what you do, i twon't play on evyerthing - DVD-R's are about 90% compatible and DVD+R's are about 70%
posted by filmgeek at 8:34 PM on April 30, 2007