I am experiencing the EXACT same issue with quality with a few exceptions:
- Sequences were imported from Premiere Pro CS6 projects to author a DVD.
- The quality in the monitor was horrific, and the output was equally bad. The entire video looked like it had rolling shutter. Yes, AME was set as the rendering engine.
- My next step in the troubleshooting process was to export my videos from PPro @ 1920 x 1080 using both h.264 and Quicktime presets at the highest quality. Note, please don't tell me you don't need to pre-render in PPro because I left the rendering to the software and there was a discernable difference in the quality when I did not render manually! Not only did I need to render each sequence, but after creating one separate sequence with the 6 smaller sequences and that sequence needed rendering too. Thanks for wasting another 4 hours of my time Adobe.
- The new video files were imported and I manually set my chapter markers and poster frames.
- Menus were customized in Photoshop CS6. To give you an idea of the difference in the quality of the output here's an example:
- These images were captured from my Apple 27" Cinema Display. The first image is a screen cap of the PS doc full screen, The next image is a screen cap of the DVD output full screen. Notice a difference? Yeah, me too, so it's not just me, is it? On a 40" HDTV the DVD looks like a second grader produced it.
- Also, I tried using every Quality Preset, outputting the file to a disk image and appending a numerical suffix for each setting to differentiate between all.
What's particularly distressing is that I can play the video file on an iMac, stream it to my 40" Samsung via Apple TV and it looks flawless, crystal clear and incredibly sharp. I'm by no means an expert, but I'm far from a noob.
I DID NOT export the videos as MPEG2 DVD files because in my mind that would not affect the quality of the menus I created in Photoshop. A PS doc is a PS doc is a PS doc. There should be no discernable difference.
FOR THE GROUP - What do I need to do to produce a DVD that looks as sharp as when I play my video on my cinema display or stream it via Air Play?
