Pelel

It will be nice if you folks can advise us the final outcome of this post. What is the conclusion? Pele

Thanks guys. Re "If you play this back on your Mac Monitor at 720x576 it will probably look OK. If you try to fill the screen it will look like C**P" I have tried to play the DVD with the original 720x576 screen size (ie not full screen mode on my iMac), the animation appears to be smoother. I suppose it is not fair to compare it to those commercial DVD production with expensive post-processing. Re Tom's ISO suggestion, I will give it a try to confirm whether the quality is related to the DVD disc media. Re the suggestion of playing MP4 on TV, I believe the quality will dramatically improve but at this stage this is not my preferred way of distributing my work due to the consideration of privacy and cost. I suppose it is much easier to copy files between USB stick than a DVD or AVDHC disc! Perhaps I should consider time-bombed .EXE or .APP on DVD data disc/download as a commercial distribution alternative. Next, I will investigate how to make a better DVD menu instead of the given PTE templates. Thanks all once again. Pele

Forgot to say one thing.... why PTE's DVD exhibits some compression (pixilation) defect even my source JPG photos are of extremely high quality (exported from Lightroom 3 in 100% without compression)? This is particularly noticeable in large screen such as my iMac 27" screen and photos in animation??????? Is there any way to ask PTE Video Builder to stop compression (such as specifying 100% quality for the quality parameter for MP4 generation function)? Pele

Thanks Tom and Lin. As per what you said, apparently I don't have better options (ways) to improve the DVD output at home office :-( FYI, I have generated an MP4 with PTE (Quality 100 and 25f to match the PAL spec of PTE DVD) and import the video to iMovie/iDVD for quality comparison. Apparently the quality of the PTE DVD is slightly better with less flickering although the Apple's DVD menu is much more appealing than that of PTE :-( As I am more a Mac user with only a Macbook with Bootcamp for Windows XP, I guess Toast 11 with the AVCHD plugin is the only option I can see if this is only way to improve the output. Unfortunately Toast 11 seems to receive a mixed bag of good and bad comments on many forums/reviews. Do you have any suggestion for other Mac products that can author AVCHD disc with MP4 input (from PTE)? Pele, not Pete :-)

Tom, are you saying standard DVD can never produce a smooth animation effect even the source input MP4 from PTE is very good? If so, the cause is more due to the bottleneck of cramping 60p data to 30p of standard DVD. In fact, I have also tried PTE 30p MP4 as the source and the result was the same - jerky. I don't have a Blu-ray burner but do you think the Toast 11 with plugin (claim to be able to burn AVCHD video on standard DVD) can achieve what you expect - ie smoother animation? Thanks in advance Pele

I think this is an old topic but really hope to resolve it this time. I use PTE V7 to produce a HD (1920x1080) MP4 using 100% quality and 60P and the MP4 video plays extremely well on my iMac 27" screen with the Quicktime player V10. The animation works very smoothly and I am delighted with this quality. However, once I imported the MP4 to iMovie (the clip was automatically optimised), the video output looks really jerky. Needless to say, the DVD produced correspondingly by iDVD exhibits the same jerky quality. In addition to the PTE-MP4-to-iMovie/iDVD approach, I have also tried the PTE DVD feature but the animation result is also jerky! So can anyone shed some light here whether it is the video editing/DVD burning software issue? Is there any way I can carry the superb MP4 quality to DVD production? Thanks in advance. Pele Leung

Thanks Frank. Your explanation is clear. I will give it a shot with Progressive mode as I think the 'Auto' option is for interlace. Cheers Pele

Videobuilder is very handy DVD authoring tool and the picture quality is fine when the slideshow contains still images only. Unfortunately all animated pictures seem to be suffering from jerky movement and particularly noticeable for fast or faster movements. I suppose the default parameter values in project option are appropriate for most situations. Have I missed something or it is another hardware problem. I look forward to hearing any suggestions. PS: I use V5.0 as 5.1 doesn't work on my computer (black screens during rendering) Cheers Pele Leung

I use V5.0 because V5.1 got problem with DVD rendering. According to the discussions in other posts, it is a hardware problem - not sure. My comments for the Video Player is that still image slideshow looks okay but the result is really marginally acceptable when you have animation - jerky etc. Apparently the same project works fine in the native EXE mode. I am not sure why and hope someone here can shed some light. Otherwise this "defect" should be reported back to the PIC2EXE team for investigation. PS: standard video project parameters are used. Cheers Pele Leung A PIC2EXE user since 2002.