-= Need Help:Best sound format for DV home movies on DVD? =-

[J Crew]

i'm not too impressed with the sound my DVD's are producing, and am wanting to improve this. right now i'm capturing my DV home movies with premiere, then converting to mpeg2 using tmpgenc, then burning on DVD with ulead workshop or movie factory 2. there seems to be no range and depth in the sound being produced using this method... everything sound really bright.

- what is the best way to improve the sound quality?
- what programs should i use?

i'm not looking to try to put the audio into 5.1 surround or anything... just want it to sound better than it currently does. thanks very much for your time and any help, peace :)

[Arky]

If you do not wish to encode to AC3 (allbeit 2-channel stereo rather than 5.1, which DV sources do not support, and the same goes for DTS, incidentally), then you are left with 2 options:

1) MPEG1-layer2. This may only be used for PAL projects, though, since NTSC players invariably do not support decoding of these audio streams.

2) PCM .wav (48khz, obviously). This may be your only viable option, in light of what I have outlined above. This is convenient because DV audio is already in exactly this format. The downside, as you are no doubt already aware, is that it eats disk space drastically! :(

Personally, I used to use MPEG1-layer2 all the time (usually at about 192kbps). Nowadays, however, I stick to 2-channel AC3 because it gives one a reasonable compression ratio, and has both PAL and NTSC compatibility. You will also notice that .AC3 compression refuses to allow you to go too low on the bitrate, which is quite telling in itself.

You say your sound isn't that great. Assuming that this bad sound quality is not already present in your captured DV soundtrack (do you have your camcorder's microphone levels adequately set?), then I see only one likely possibility - perhaps you are over-compressing your audio in MPEG1-layer 2. If you are using MPEG1-layer2 audio compression, you should ideally not go any lower than 128kbps (96khz where DVD-R space is really pushed). Don't forget that MPEG1-Layer2 compression is not as efficient as MPEG1-layer3 (.mp3), so one needs more bitrate for a layer 2 file to sound as good as a layer 3 file, relatively-speaking (of cour4se, .mp3 is not accepted by the DVD standards).

In short, it's a bit of a minefield - best option for you is probably .AC3, or (if you are creating PAL projects only), MPEG1-layer2, but only is you ensure that you use a bitrate of at least 128kbps.


Arky ;o)

[auenf]

Originally posted by Arky
If you do not wish to encode to AC3 (allbeit 2-channel stereo rather than 5.1, which DV sources do not support, and the same goes for DTS, incidentally)

actually, DV *can* support up to 4 channels...

In short, it's a bit of a minefield - best option for you is probably .AC3, or (if you are creating PAL projects only), MPEG1-layer2, but only is you ensure that you use a bitrate of at least 128kbps.

actually, 224 is the optimum for 2ch mpeg layer 2 audio.

Enf...