I just finished running some tests comparing a few different DVD editing and authoring programs (and their embedded MPEG encoders) using Poser AVIs and image sequences as inputs. My aim was to find the best quality display of Poser 4 animations on my HDTV digital television after burning the animations into DVD.

Bottom line was I was very disappointed at the quality of the MPEG encoders used by Ulead Movie Factory 2 and Dazzle Complete DVD. I also tried the MPEG output file mode for Pinnacle Studio 7 (to burn directly to DVD you need to upgrade to Studio 8, but I read about major problems with crashing during burning... and I had already bought ENOUGH authoring programs trying to find the right one). But Pinnacle MPEGs were even worse.

As a matter of fact, I was also very disappointed in the quality of the MPEG encoding by these programs of regular digital camcorder footage when burning to DVD. I saw lots of distracting jaggies, especially in outdoor high-contrast action shots. And doing something like a slow pan across a grassy area made the grass look all jaggy and pixelated. Very disappointing since I had just assumed DVD authoring programs would make perfect replicas of my digital camcorder tapes.

Then I found some advice on the DVDplusRW.org forums that suggested using TMPGEnc to encode the MPEG files. In fact, I found four different message threads which suggested TMPGEnc as the best encoder. I tried their trial version last weekend and it works better than anything else I've tried on regular camcorder footage (but still not as perfect as the original tape plays on my HDTV).

TMPGEnc also did a very good job with Poser 4 avi files, though I haven't really tried this out extensively with lots of different tweaking sets yet. And I'm not sure the TMPGEnc results on DVD will be better than some earlier tests burning Poser AVIs to DVD I did using Quicktime to convert the 640-x480 AVI output from Poser to a DVD-compliant 720x480 stream (Ulead, but not Dazzle, can import Quicktime MOV files and you can tell Ulead Movie Factory 2 not to re-encode DVD compliant streams, so you avoid their MPEG encoder that way... though I think Dazzle will also skip it's own encoding if the input is DVD-compliant). I remember from my testing that this gave good results, but I need to look back over those tests to be sure (I'm not very rigorously organized when I do these tests... not a scientist type... and I forget stuff too quickly these days)

So my advice would be to try the free version of TMPGEnc at TMPGEnc.net. This trial version lets you encode MPEG-2 files for 11 days or so before requiring an upgrade to TMPGEnc-Plus. I've been convinced enough of the quality improvement using TMPGEnc for my digital camcorder DVD authoring that I plan to get the upgrade, which I think is about $45 for a download version.

Let us know what you think, and if you find any other good programs or strategies.

Good luck...