352 X 240 or 352 X 480: Any difference?

[perdomot]

I'm archiving my vhs movie collection and was wondering if there is any difference when making VCDs? I know vhs have a limited number of lines but I'm not sure which is the proper amount or whether I need to do an IVTC when capturing at 352 X 240. Thanks for any help you folks can offer.

[Ejoc]

352x480 is CVD or 1/2 DVD, not VCD
So if your are making a VCD keep it at 352x240

I capture at 320x240, and convert to 352x480 to make CVDs. And I do IVTC, I use AVISynth instead of TMPGEnc's to do it.

[ZippyP.]

I capture at 320x240, and convert to 352x480 to make CVDs.

Really? Most people would consider that to be a bad technique. Going from a lower to higher resolution creates blockiness and is usually not recommended.

352x480 is double the resolution and is much better quality if you can capture at that figure (or higher), otherwise you may as well just stay at VCD resolution. 1/2 D1 (352x480) is widely used as the final DVD resolution from home video capture.

[adam]

If you want to do an IVTC, which is almost necessary for VCD, then you MUST capture at, at least 352x480 (for NTSC.) Any lower and the stream cannot support interlacing, and without fields there is nothing to IVTC.

So you should cap at 352x480 and IVTC while converting to 352x240. This will preserve all of the temporal motion data, and the 23.976fps output will be telecined to 29.97fps retaining all of the temporal information that the source had.

Ejoc, you are not doing an IVTC because your source is no longer proper for such a technique. By capping at 320x240 you have just thrown out half of your fields, and you are simply deinterlacing any remaining frames with interlacing artifacts, and I suppose simply decimating frames to decrease the framerate. I would think this would look pretty bad. If you simply modify your process by capping at 352x480 instead, you will be fine.