After many, many, many hours doing a 30 minute end of the year video for my sons soccer team with two slide shows I burn a DVD to see how it is prior to burning the 20 for all the team and all video taken with my new DVD 403 Sony looks jumpy and terrible. This is after I upgraded my computer with new RAM, 250Gb hard drive, upgraded my Premier Elements to 2.0 and have had to do the video 3 times over when I had to upgrade Window XP! The video quality of the games with my new camera look awesome on the DVD preview, much better than the other video done on tape. I am trying to burn on DVD-R dvd's as opposed to RW and that did not help. Video was taken at 16:9 wide format - could that be the problem? I know that because the camera is so new it is not listed as one of the supported cameras. So I finalized the mini DVD's in the video camera and then added media from the disk drive which worked fine and looked great. Don't know what the problem is and how to fix it - ready to dump Premier Elements at this point if another video software tool will be better and not have these issues. Any suggestions? The Picture Package software that came with the package doesn't come close to having all the features needed for the type of video editing that I have done. HELP! Anyone know what the problem is or suggestions on solutions? I really don't want to have to dump the footage shot with the new camera and cut the video in half if I don't need to (too many boys will be cut from the video).

Premiere Elements is not the ideal program to edit the mpeg2 (DVD) format files that your DVD403 captures in. Having said that, you should still get watchable DVDs. I played around with a trial version of PE2 to edit my DVD203 videos and it worked OK. You probably went wrong with your settings when you burned to DVD. These should be set to mpeg2 DVD highest quality 2 pass VBR.

The best programs for editing mpeg2 DVD video IMO are Womble Mpeg Video Wizard and Ulead Video Studio 9 in that order. They do smart encoding when saving the clip after editing, meaning they only re encode the bits that have changed in editing. PE2 re encodes the whole clip.

Try posting in the Sony DVD Camcorder section of the forums to get quicker responses to your questions. Also have a look around in other posts there, you will find a lot of info specific to Sony DVD cams

You need to Reverse Field Dominence on your clips. DVD Camcorders reverse the fields from DV-AVI and that is what Premiere Elements works with by default.

Right click on your clips and select Field Options/Reverse Field Dominence. The only problem is you have to do this before adding any effects, transitions or editing.

I'm having the same problem with DVDs that are shaky and jumpy whenever the camera view moves. I'm using a new JVC Hard Drive camera, which records in MPEG-2 format. I thougt the problem may have been when Adobe converts the MPEG-2 into DVD format. Need Help?

You need to reverse field dominence. Check out the Adobe User forum FAQs, there are many there that have already dealt with this problem and solved it.

It was a revelation to read so many of your comments relating to the difficulty of editing footage taken from Sony DVD Handycam and editing softwares such as Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. I have spent 5 months editing my holiday footage of Texas and Mexico from last Christmas and have had the following nightmares. Firstly all footage shot on the VR mode cannot be imported into Adobe or any other software for that matter, so can only be imported through picture package (software that comes with the Sony camera) but which can only be basically edited and then reimported onto a mini disc to camera - not much use if you wish to turn it into a little film; or you can select a few images and put through the muvee technology process with your choice of music, get a 3 minutes pop video of some sort which is clever enough and fun but again cannot sustain a proper editing version with titles, mixing music and sound etc. So, if you really want to work with your original VR footage you will have to process the format to acceptable mpg compression by transferring it through a software like TEMPgE to enable you to edit it with the adobe software. So far so good. Or if your footage is filmed in video mode than you can import your mini disc directly into the adobe software (provided you have finalized it) and you can edit your movie. Sounds great. However, going through the process of editing a 40 mins video (two 40 mins in fact) on computer with the existing mixed formats, compression and then again rendering and compression to create a 12cm DVD, is the most frustrating and disappointing thing you can do, if you are stubborn like me and dogged to create your masterpiece that no one but yourself will ever see! I already started with the state of the art Sony Vaio PCV W2 computer, doubled its memory, added an extra drive, fiddled with the virtual memory, deleted so many files that the discs had plenty of space, all discs were degramented and checked for errors etc and no other programs were running. During the process the editing was very slow and sometimes it would freeze up. Seeing the video footage was at times slow and never showed you the degraded quality until you saw it on the big screen. The worst of all is the blurry effect on any camera movement, regardless whether it had been through TEMPgE or not. The beauty of 16:09 remained as long as the camera was static, or the pan very slow and ditto for the zoom. But with faster moves, and filming through a car window etc., it is agonising and hurts your eyes. I have had some help from adobe but to no avail, I have scanned the web for people with the same problem as me and have spent time and money getting extra software like TEMPgE and WinAVI and others and the result is the same. I am left with sadness that a beautiful piece of engineering like the Sony DVD 403E Handycam cannot deliver footage that can be copied onto a DVD disc, with enough editing to create a finished video rather than just accumulate images like a photographic album made up of moving images; which may be fine for some but not good enough for the mad buffs among us who just need that finishing touch. If anyone has a clear and simple solution as to what to do in the future to overcome the blurring and degrading quality to be able to create a video and still have a life, please let me know. Thank you.

I hope I can add some info that will help. All DV-AVI footage is lower field first (LFF). I don't know the percentage but its gotta be near 90% of all mpeg2s are UFF.

I do believe that if you keep your UFF mpeg in its current form and simply transcode it to DV/AVI, you will also simply embed the incorrect field order in your newly created AVI file. If you first reverse the field order as Chuck suggests, you will go a long way in rectifying the jittery footage 90% of the time

What I wanted to add is that there is a program that may help determine the current mpeg's field order a little more. Its called GSpot and you can get it at the link below. Open the program, click on the upper left FILE>OPEN, browse to your mpeg in question, and open it in GSpot. In the program window, second box down on the right, in very small letters you will see TFF BFF. Top and Bottom, another way of saying Upper and Lower. Whichever order GSpot interprets the field order, will be highlighted. Knowing that Adobe defaults to LFF will help determine your best course of action for that clip.

Once you establish what the field order is of your source footage, IE your camcorder, you will not have to continually verify it like this in the future.

http://gspot.headbands.com/

Chuck may be able to verify what I'm about to tell you, but beyond rectifying the jitter problem, there is another issue with Adobe and Mpegs.

I do believe that even once you get your situation corrected (field order wise) from right clicking on your clip on the timeline and selecting reverse field dominance, Adobe PE2, being an AVI editor, will have to re-encode your mpeg clip to AVI behind the scenes in order to allow editing. Each time you transcode a file its going to loose quality. It was of course encoded once already to a highly compressed mpeg by your camcorder when you shot the footage.

We know that it will be transcoded at least once more back to mpeg for your DVD, maybe more if you resave as an AVI and bring it into an authoring program for menus.

Adobe is a great program for editing AVIs captured from its capture module. It is not, in my mind, the ideal choice for editing mpegs. (if anything is). Mpegs are designed to be a finished / viewing format, not edit friendly.

I've played with a program called Womble that is designed to deal with mpegs. I think you should at least look into it. If you can find a program that will do what you want and maintain the mpeg format throughout your editing, without any transcoding, you may be better off.

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So much information... the more I learn, the more questions develop. If I keep learning at this pace, soon I'll be too dumb to continue!

Thank you Chuch and Jj4 SO much! Have indeed reversed the field order and it works - a slight flickering on top of the image showing perhaps a slight loss in quality but at least the image is good and the DVD watchable - you two are video angels!
I have downloaded Womble and will experiment to see whether this is a better bet than adobe PE. I still can't understand why adobe is so slow during the editing process and sometimes freezes up. I have tried to extend the virtual memory but it is still a pain.
I know next time to firstly film in video format only with the camcorder, then possibly use Womble and see if I can beat my record of 5 months!!
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By the way, Jj4, between learning and confusion lies a great human being. Keep going!