Resolution for encoding a DVD?

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CorpusCallosum

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Wannabe Geek

#55326 30-Dec-2009 09:33

Hey I am new to creating DVDs, I have read in other places that video for DVD resolution should be 720 x480 for standard aspect ratio. But that seems way too low! For instance when I watch professional DVDs in full-screen on my home computer with a high resolution of say 1680 x 1050, the image looks great, but wouldn't the image need to be scaled up a tremendous amount, therefore creating a low-quality image?

When I export my movie from Flash to AVI at 720x480, and play that full-screen, it looks pretty shoddy. But maybe that's just because the compression on the AVI is poor, not because of the resolution. I will continue playing around with it, but just wanted to put this out there in case anyone had any ideas about it. Thanks!

Quidam

291 posts

Ultimate Geek

#286015 30-Dec-2009 09:46

Hi there.

Well DVD SD (Standard Definition) comes in two flavours, NTSC, which is indeed 720*480 and PAL, which is 720*576. NZ DVD's are PAL.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL for more details, because there are other differences as well as resolution.

As for how good a SD DVD looks on a high res screen, that comes down to the quality of the original recording (which is more than just an issue of resolution -for example Lord of the Rings extended editions each came on 2 discs allowing for a higher average bit rate) and also the quality of the software that is doing the upscaling; de-interlacing; pull-down detection etc.

For example DVD's often look almost HD quality when played on many modern HD TV's

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sbiddle

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#286016 30-Dec-2009 09:47

DVD resolution is 720 x 480 for NTSC or 720 x 576 for PAL.

This is the maximum resolution of the DVD format.