Hi Russ.
Thanks so much for your response. I'm shooting 1920x1080 30p on a Canon DSLR. I've been shooting this format and encoding the same way for a long time. This particular project is fairly basic. It's a three camera workout DVD, with outdoor natural light plus HMI and very smooth jib moves.
This is just the first time I've looked at the DVD on this new flatscreen. Previously I had only seen it on my computer, a stand-alone, portable DVD player, or an older television connected to a DVD player. Obviously, the quality was never amazing, as it was downsized to SD, but there was no pixelation or stair-stepping.
So I'm shocked to see how this looks on this TV. I've gone through all the TV settings to see if it's something I can adjust on that end. The DVD player that's connected to it is older, so I thought I could maybe adjust some settings there, but haven't figured it out. When I play commercially made DVD's they look fine, so I figured the devices can't be the problem.
Here's the recipe I've been using, that's worked for me. But maybe it needs some tweaking. I am so appreciative of your help and would welcome any advice.
Thanks again.
Description: Fits up to 90 minutes of video with Dolby Digital audio at 192 Kbps or 60 minutes with AIFF audio on a DVD-5
File Extension: m2v
Estimated size: 1.23 GB
Type: MPEG-2 video elementary stream
Usage:SD DVD
Video Encoder
Format: M2V
Width and Height: Automatic
Selected: 720 x 480
Pixel aspect ratio: NTSC CCIR 601/DV (16:9)
Crop: None
Padding: None
Frame rate: (100% of source)
Selected: 29.97
Frame Controls Automatically selected:
Retiming: (Fast) Nearest Frame
Resize Filter: Linear Filter
Deinterlace Filter: Fast (Line Averaging)
Adaptive Details: On
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Same as Source
Start timecode from source
Aspect ratio: Automatic
Selected 16:9
Field dominance: Automatic:
Selected Top first
Average bit rate: 5.5 (Mbps)
2 Pass VBR enabled
Maximum bit rate: 7.2 (Mbps)
High quality
Better motion estimation
Closed GOP Size: 12, Structure: IBBP
DVD Studio Pro meta-data enabled