Well appearently I got a decent version now. I tried to duplicate the settings exactly. However I made sure the bit rate was 15mbits/sec - this resulted in a movie that was twice as large, so it can only fit on a dl dvd if I want to do that at all. I'm going to attempt again to do another encode later. I just can't seem to get the right results. Of note there is a setting called "Upper field first" and "Lower field first" it was set to lower, and the source video was upper, so that may have had to do with my decent results this time. Really I just wanted a direct copy with the pieces edited together. Oh well.