Originally posted by: pittrekOh my god, I'm just looking at these screenshots at work on a MUCH better monitor and they look terrible

Any tips how to avoid it in MY project ?

* Your anamorphic DVD9-quality fan-edit project will need to look great on a huge, high-definition plasma wall-screen as well as a laptop, or at least as good as the source material at any rate-- because that's what people are going to expect if you advertise it as "anamorphic 16x9 wide-screen" or anything else promising rich, creamy lossless goodness. This means you should have a monitor like that at your disposal. OCP spent a lot of time making an 8gig movie that looks no better than a 700mb DIVX rip almost certainly for the reason that he didn't examine the output on higher-qualify platforms. Your output should look good when played from a PC, a Mac, or a stand-alone DVD-player.

* Don't do a damn thing until you've made an exhaustive check-list of every single feature of the film you want to change. Talk to fans endlessly. When you're about to begin....put it off for a little bit longer -- because it's guaranteed that a couple more items will pop up. Consult your check-list repeatedly: Pretend you're a airliner pilot -- don't let any niggling detail come back and bite you in the ass (e.g., Greedo's subtitles, et al).

* (Previous comments regarding filters, lossy formats, encoding, etc.) I find it helps to fiddle with minor test projects first. Like half-hour cartoon episodes with reduced color palettes -- then render quickly.

* Once you have application filters, tools, drivers and codecs all lined up perfectly and have had excellent results on your test projects, make sure auto-updating is turned OFF for everything -- you don't want some piece of software auto-updating in the middle of your work and suddenly reducing compatibility or introducing other errors.

* Provide samples to friends and fans regularly so they can critique the quality of your work. Submit samples for analysis in video-editing forums. The professionals in said forums will know as lot more about the suitability of various applications to your task.

* Don't ask for DVD cover art until the project is well along and you've built up good cred.

* Distribution of finished product: You can break your piggy-bank buying DVD9s to ship to all hither-'n-gone, support the spam merchants at RapidShare, indulge the arcana of usenet RAR-segmenting or IRC servers.... Or you could shoot for the much, much larger bittorrent audience by composing a decent multi-tracker .torrent of an ISO file (or folder full of VOBs) that will self-perpetuate after you're done seeding. I hereby offer my services to anyone in this, latter regard. (Ensuring that a torrent reliably self-perpetuates takes very little additional time, but the learning curve to knowing exactly what to do is moderately steep and filled with frustrations.)