Has anyone ever had this problem? I'm filming a wedding and when the bride comes down the aisle entering and exiting, the photographer is taking shots behind me. After editing the video everything is great on the preview window and on the tv screen I'm previewing the video on, but when I burn the project to a DVD, the flash coming from behind me from the photographer makes the video distorted. The distortion is right when the camera picks up the flash and then goes back to the clear picture before the flash. Never had this problem before, at least not that I ever noticed, and I think I would have noticed. Any ideas?

Is it possible that the camera is on the automatic exposure setting and it is reacting to the flash?  It would then take a moment to readjust after the flash.

No, the raw footage is fine, the clips on the timeline are fine, its just on the burned dvd is where the distortion appears.

Sorry, I misread your initial post.  It doesn't make logical sense for the flash to affect the final output, without any noticeable effect during editing.  I have never experienced this and am at a loss.

I too would be curious to see an explanation from someone more knowledgeable.

This is a well known problem with mpeg-2 encoding. Sounds like the original timeline is DV. Using CBR encoding rather than VBR will reduce the effect somewhat. Applying a legalizing filter may help a bit.

Also watch your bitrate. The flash is effectively extremely fast motion, and if your bitrate is too low you'll end up pixelated.

"legalizing filter"  - never heard of a legalizing filter... what is that?  A bong waterpipe made in the Netherlands? 

The legalizing tool in color corrector constrains the whites and darks to the limits permitted by broadcast standards. There are a number of settings for how softly the extremes are clipped.

I would say that the reason you don't see the flash while editing is that your inlay is set to show only one field...and the flash is quick enough to only make 1/2 a frame (one field).  Click on the 'Q' and you can set it to show both fields - which will also make the video in the monitors look 'combed' while cutting, but will be fine when output to DVD. 

I see the flash while editing, it just doesnt distort the video while editing

I am sure this is a function of the mpeg encoder. Are you using VBR or CBR? It could be using VBR that the encoder is becoming confused by the flash and not setting the bitrate properly for a second or so. Try using CBR and see if that fixes it. This would be especially true if you are encoding the DVD with Liquid and the program length significantly exceeds one hour as the Liquid encoder is single pass.

Bob, Dave Stone and I answered this a few posts back.

Does using  CBR affect the audio?

The bitrate for audio is fixed regardless of VBR or CBR,

The audio encode can be either Dolby Digital 384kbs if music or surround or PCM if sound fidelity is critical.  This is true with either VBR or CBR.

PCM does steal 1500 kbs from the video max limits, if the DVD is around an hour, no problem, video can be set from 6mbs to 8mbs

Ok, my project is almost 2 hours long, I'm using the VBR setting along with PCM. If I understand correctly, the length of the project along with the audio setting can affect the quality of the video. If I change my settings to CBR and dolby digital, I should have a higer quality video.

I would go to a dual layer disk. You are against the wall on this one. On a long program VBR will generally give better results as bitrate is not wasted on scenes that are non-demanding. Motion scenes and high detail are demanding. If you routinely put this much on a disk consider purchasing TmpGe Express 4 which has multi pass VBR. In your case, for audio use Dolby as it will leave as much bitrate for the video as practicial.

You really need to research the subject more thoroughly/