SVCD seems less Vibrant than original DVD...

[will trver]

I have made several SVCD's from dvd's and noticed they all look less vibrant or lacking of rich color compared to DVD. Has anyone else noticed this or have a solution for this washed out look?


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[speedy]

Of course they are. You can hardly expect a SVCD to look exactly like a DVD especially if you are making a "copy" of a commericial DVD which may have been encoding with bitrates of anywhere from 3 to 15 MBPS whereas the standard for SVCD is a tiny fraciton of that. If you want your copy to come close to being a duplicate of the DVD, then get a DVD burner which will set you back anywhere from $600-$1,000 with media around $15 a pop and burn at a high bitrate. Till those prices come down and they will, be happy a well made SVCD or VCD is "close" to DVD quality if you learn from the many tips offered in this forum and in the many how-to articles.

[igoryonya]

There is a possible solution:
Try to split your Movie on 2 or 3 CDs Depending on the length of the movie, Frame Rate and Wide or Full Screen Format.
The longer the movie, the higher the framerate and if the movie is Full Screen Use more CDs. To use more CDs, set Double Bitrate of what you've set before.

[will trver]

I'm not sure you should have answered the question - you accepted lower vibrance as due to a lower bitrate. I've ran many tests and played with a few filters and was wondering if anyone had a good way to compensate for this affect. MY DVD player can play up to 3500 bitrate and I gain no vibrance going to that bitrate. I'm also not convinced that a DVD to DVD rip wouldn't produce the same washed out look - but with a better resolution and less artifacts.

Any insight would be appreciated.

[Xitanium]

what encoder are u using. if ur using tmpgenc then try cce and vice versa.

[will trver]

I'm currently using Tmpeg with 2pass VBR. I did a comparison with 1 minute clips and the CCe clips were all choppy. I'm not sure why (I did put all clips on same cd). Is CCE Supposed to be more Vibrant and rich in color?
I've read all the arguements between the 2 but no one seems to mention this issue.

[AntnyMD]

A DVD to DVD rip will produce exactly the same quality as the original DVD if you do not re-encode the video! Commerical DVDs contain a lot more data than a consumer DVD blank will, so direct DVD-to-DVD copying will require 2 blank DVDs for every average commerical DVD to maintain the exact same quality.

[will trver]

Take a DVD rip it to vob (smartripper).
DVD2AVI a project file
Encode it at 9000 kbs with TMPEG like a DVD.
Now compare the vibrance of the movie.
It gets lost somewhere in the re-encoding.
Hasn't anyone else here noticed that the washout effect is not directly corelated to the bitrate?

[mijman]

Since you're using TMPGenc, go into the settings, advanced tab, and select basic color enhancement. Play around with those to increase color. I set mine at +15 for red and blue for my video captures, and decrease the gamma a bit too. I don't usually use them for DVD rips, tho, but you might wanna play with them.

[speedy]

I doubt anybody is more of a nitpicker than I am. I've been known to spend DAYS messing with just a few scenes to tweak the s*** out of them just to get a tad better end result.

Not all video editors are created equal. Some simply do some things better than others. Ditto for what codec you use to encode. There is no getting away from the size verses quality issue. If you want a reasonable file size and not end up with a handful of CD's you are going to lose some image quality. Common sense should tell you the less bits, the lower the quality.

To attempt to compensate if all I got to work with is some MPEG file I try adjusting the saturation and luminance levels. Again, it depends on what filters you use. I've tried all kinds of video editors and now my favorite is Video Factory from Sonic Foundry. Only about $70 and it does rings around the others. Still use VitrualDub and TempGen on top of it. Still the luminance and saturation levels in Video Factory can restore a washed out or over saturated video to something approaching the original, I'm now talking MPEG, not DVD.

I'm a little preplexed over the comments with those attempting to take a source DVD and crank out a duplicate using either the obviously inferior VCD or SVCD format and then whine about loss of quality. Come on guys, you can't expect a DVD that may take up 2-3 or more GB of space on the source disk to look the same once you convert it to VCD or SVCD. Something has got to give and that is image quality. So sure, you will lose some of the crispness, richness and sparkle. Can't be helped.