Pixelated lines

[nanoreactor]

Hi everyone. long time reader, first time poster ( haha i always wanted to say that)

I animate. and can burn my cartoons directly from my comp to DVD. But i have a quality issue, i read for a while and didnt see this question answered, I dont really know where to post it though. I use DVD workshop by Ulead. and it says its encoding at 8000 kbs. I think thats as high as youd want to go with your DVD's but when i watch the animation on TV.. the lines are crystal clear when theyre still. but when a line is moving it looks all pixelated. I dont see this problem on professional DVD's nearly as badly. what am i doing wrong?

[SomeJoe]

Sounds like you have a mismatch between your frame rate and/or field order between the generated animation and the MPEG-2 playback.

At what frame rate are you generating the animation, and are you generating animated frames or fields? Also, are you playing the video back on NTSC or PAL?

[nanoreactor]

well. im not sure what the .avi is exactly, it says 30 fps. but is it just rounding off the 29.97 it should be? its generating frames im pretty sure, and the software i animate in (RETAS Pro if that means anything to anyone) asks for an output size when it renders the AVI . I select 720x480.The actual animation is at 24 fps, but RETAS does a 3>2 pulldown to make it 30 fps. but Ulead DVD workshop asks for an output size as well for encoding, you think maybe its my resolution? i always output at 720x480 becuase i thought that was the NTSC standard.

[nanoreactor]

I jsut thought of something.. when i export the .avi file from my animation program. it says 24>30 for the frame pulldown. then when i look at the properties of the .avi it generated. it says it is a 30 fps video. shouldnt it say its 29.97 for NTSC? and then when Ulead converts it to mpeg2 it makes it 29.97 fps and messes it up?

[SomeJoe]

Well, the .avi being 30 fps instead of 29.97 fps won't really cause problems in the video. Where that will cause issues is with the audio sync. You should see if the animation program will output at 29.97 instead of 30 (or 23.976 instead of 24).

I think one of the problems that's causing your pixelation will be the telecine/3:2 pulldown. That will cause straight lines to get broken up and have a jittery effect on pans. It would be much better if your animation package could generate 29.97 fps natively instead of 24 fps.

Another source of a problem is that the ULead package doesn't understand that your frames are progressive. It is probably compressing them assuming that they're interlaced, resulting in less-than ideal compression.

What I would do is see if your animation package can generate 24 fps (23.976 fps, actually) directly, and then encode that with CCE instead of ULead, and run pulldown.exe on it. This will allow the MPEG-2 compression to be applied to progressive frames instead of telecined fields, resulting in better compression, plus CCE is a far better MPEG-2 package than the ULead's built-in compressor. Then the pulldown.exe part will enable the DVD player do the 3:2 pulldown on playback. This may help your display. Also, if you take that DVD and play it back on a progressive scan DVD player with a progressive scan display, this will show the animation at 23.976 fps progressively, without the 3:2 pulldown.

[nanoreactor]

Alright so basicly i need better compression. yes i see what youre saying, ulead was probably made for home movies and things. where as digital animation has crystal clear lines and is a bit harder to compress well. ill try out some different solutions. thank you for your input. it was most helpfull!