Blurry DVD Motion Menus with CCE

[greenmr]

I use DVD2SVCD to generate DVD-ready MPEG2 files, then author with DVD-Lab Pro. I create motion menus in DVD-Lab, which allows you to either generate them directly as MPEG2, or to an AVI file for seperate encoding. The built-in encoder does a great job, but leaves GOPs open, so I want to be able to use CCE to encode the DVD-Lab generated AVI motion menus. I use the Huffyuv lossless codec when saving the AVI files, which look great, but when I encode with CCE the MPEG2 output file looks "fuzzy" or "blurry" compared to both the source AVI file, and to the directly generated MPEG2 file.

I have tried messing with just about every video encoding setting in CCE, and various bitrates and quality settings, but the CCE MPEG2 output file is always significantly inferior to the one generated when I let DVD-Lab generate the motion menu directly as MPEG2. I am using CCE Full Retail 2.67.00.27, and generating 720x480 4:3 motion menus... I know this is pretty ambiguous description, but does anyone have any idea what I might be doing wrong? The actual movie encoding with CCE looks beautiful.

[Trahald]

Without seeing your settings I can make some suggestions. BTW Welcome to the forum!

1. make sure cce's built in preprocessing is off. this stuff tends to soften the picture. its in the 'picture quality' tab in sp2

2. use a normal to high detail matrix. the default mpeg matrix is what i use to use on most encodes but you can do use the fox matrix (its in the rebuilder matrix editor if you need a quick way to find it) which is a high detail matrix. only use if you are willing to put some bitrate in. which brings me to the next suggestion

3. make sure you are giving enough bitrate. since menus are short and sometimes active segments, bit distribution doesnt have much to work with. try to give some moderate bitrate (3500+.) especially if you use fox matrix

thats all i can think of atm. good luck