How many CD's to be used for 1 SVCD?

[RastaPiggy]

I'm wondering how many CD's I should use for a SVCD movie.. I've made a 100 minute movie and I split it over 2 CD's.. but when does the quality get to crappy? When should I use a 3rd CD? I was thinking about 120 minutes or longer. Allready now the image gets blocky when the images are fast moving.. Is this normal? Or does this have nothing to do with the fact I'm compressing the SVCD to much?

[digitaldave]

You need to balance several factors when dealing with video.

Quality

Compression

Available Disk Space

You have to make these choices. Each one affect the other one.

First determine the level of quality you want to have. Then compress the video to achieve that quality. Then see how much space that requires.

[supersam]

to acheive the great quality, u can buy 870mb cd-r's, which will turn into 990mb if u burn with nero or any other burning software that has the overburn feature. with overburn u get that extra 190mb per cd!! . and if u expand the movie over 2 cd's then that comes out to 380mb of extra space that will make the movie look better. I, myself buy only these types of blank cd's to acheive better results as compared to "standard" cd-r's . the the most lengthy movie i have put on a cd was 1:45:00 or so and the quality was good as compared if i were to put this movie onto on standard cd-r. i have a lite-on so i have no problem doing overburning. anyways, just wanted to give my advice or opinion

[RastaPiggy]

Disk Space aint a problem at all.. and the overburning.. well I just don\t know about that..

But I want to know when the movie gets 2 blocky 2 really enojy it rather than getting annoyed.. if ya know what i mean

[supersam]

a movie getting too blocky can be due to many things. some of them include bitrate used on a movie, number of cds used, length of the movie, and if the movie is a fast paced action or a not so action type of movie.

[sterno]

But I want to know when the movie gets 2 blocky 2 really enojy it rather than getting annoyed..

There is no easy answer to this. Material with lots of motion and high-action scenes will get blocky at a higher bitrate than material that's slower. On top of that, different people have different tolerances for blockiness. Normally, I try not to put more than around 1 hour on a disc with SVCD, and I'm happy with my results.

[RastaPiggy]

Yes... I was thinking about mayB around an hour..

I was wondering.. before this I made VCD's... but with a VCD the blocks don't seem to appear.. and that with a 150 minutes movie split over 2 CD's.. bit weird

[extract]

I'm wondering how many CD's I should use for a SVCD movie.. I've made a 100 minute movie and I split it over 2 CD's.. but when does the quality get to crappy? When should I use a 3rd CD? I was thinking about 120 minutes or longer. Allready now the image gets blocky when the images are fast moving.. Is this normal? Or does this have nothing to do with the fact I'm compressing the SVCD to much?

An 80 Min CD can hold 805 MB in SVCD format, that is 49 min with 200 Kbit MPEG-2 and 224KBit MP2 audio, that is usually enough to provide decent quality. In ffmpegX 0.0.7 you can use bicubic scaling for added quality. Other than that, get a better MPEG-2 encoder, I downloaded a Public Beta of Bitvice 1.3 Betaversion for free at Innobits, it is the best money can buy. You could also try to reduce audio quality and add it to video for enhanced quality.

[sterno]

I was wondering.. before this I made VCD's... but with a VCD the blocks don't seem to appear.. and that with a 150 minutes movie split over 2 CD's.. bit weird

VCDs use a much lower resolution than SVCDs. SVCD has almost 3 times as much information to encode, but the standard only allows for a maximum bitrate that's only a little over twice what VCD uses.

[supersam]

thats right!!! vcds have a lot resolution than svcds, therefore, macroblocks are hardly noticeable (unless of course u use very low bitrates). svcds on the other hand have more resolution and makes it easier for macroblocks to appear if ur not using enought bitrate along with custom color corrections which will eliminate macroblocks during dark scenes. as for the longest movie i have put on a cd-r was 1:50:00 i think, the movie was panic room(svcd) and the quality looks oustanding.

[extract]

I was wondering.. before this I made VCD's... but with a VCD the blocks don't seem to appear.. and that with a 150 minutes movie split over 2 CD's.. bit weird

VCDs use a much lower resolution than SVCDs. SVCD has almost 3 times as much information to encode, but the standard only allows for a maximum bitrate that's only a little over twice what VCD uses.

You get much, much lower resolution in VCDs and at 150 mins on a 80 min CD with standard 224kbit/s MP2 audio you are down to 500 kbit/s video. for NTSC standard you hit 0.22 bpp and get pretty lousy quality!

There is only 2.25 times as much info to encode for a standard NTSC SVCD over a standard NTSC VCD and MPEG-2 is compression much better than MPEG-1 used in VCDs.

Of cause the ideal would be if you could use MPEG-4, so far only 12 DVD standalone players supports it.

[RastaPiggy]

I was wondering.. before this I made VCD's... but with a VCD the blocks don't seem to appear.. and that with a 150 minutes movie split over 2 CD's.. bit weird

VCDs use a much lower resolution than SVCDs. SVCD has almost 3 times as much information to encode, but the standard only allows for a maximum bitrate that's only a little over twice what VCD uses.

You get much, much lower resolution in VCDs and at 150 mins on a 80 min CD with standard 224kbit/s MP2 audio you are down to 500 kbit/s video. for NTSC standard you hit 0.22 bpp and get pretty lousy quality!

There is only 2.25 times as much info to encode for a standard NTSC SVCD over a standard NTSC VCD and MPEG-2 is compression much better than MPEG-1 used in VCDs.

Of cause the ideal would be if you could use MPEG-4, so far only 12 DVD standalone players supports it.

Yeah indeed... It would be very cool if it would be possible to simply play a DivX on a DVD player. You can get better quality than SVCD on 1 CD. Would be very cool.