Advice on Encoding Very Old Home Movies

[Zak0]

I've captured some very very old home movies (from the 1960's and 1970's) to AVI using my capture card and now would like to encode them in some way so that they can be viewed on my DVD player. My player (Apex 660) can play VCD, several XVCD, and SVCD formats, so I have several formats to choose from...

My requirements:
1) I'd like to have no less than 30 minutes per disc if possible.
2) The quality needs to be as good as possible (no blockiness, etc). This will be difficult, as the original is EXTREMELY dirty (lots of scratches and random noise), but I'm hoping that sufficient bitrate can cure it.

Someday, I plan to transfer these to actual DVD media (when the recorders and media are affordable and I'd just like to keep the original video from degrading any further if possible.

Hopefully someone will have some advice for me... I've tried standard VCD format/bitrate and it's terribly blocky. Upping the bitrate (XVCD) and trying some noise filters ends up being way too blurry. So far, I haven't managed to figure out how to get from a 320x240 AVI to a 480x480 SVCD MPEG-2 format - any advice on that will be appreciated too. <smile>

Thanks!

[Beavis]

I'm a big fan of doing all your filtering and editing with the AVI file and then encoding that to MPEG without any further processing. Use VirtualDUB and you'll get instant on-screen previews of your filter effects. From that point it's a lot of trial and error to see what you like best. Check out the smart smoother filter (which might help with some of your noise) and there's plenty of others as well. VirtualDUB also has a resize filter which can get you to a 480x480 AVI file for encoding directly to MPEG-2 SVCD. You probably will have to have a decently high VCD bitrate or SVCD average bitrate to get good results, but if you only want to fit like 30 minutes per disk you can get pretty high. There's no perfect answer for you because no one else has ever worked with your source material.

[Lamont Cranston]

I assume these very old home movies you have captured are 8mm or super 8mm? I have captured old 8mm movies dating back to 1939 and made VCDs that were excellent. I carefuly cleaned the film using Kodak movie film cleaner. To get the best results for me I captured at 320 x 480. compressed with PicVideo codec [luminance = 5, chrominance = 6]. Next I took the flicker out using the deflicker filter and saved the file compressed with Picvideo [quality = 20]. Finally, I frameserved to TMPGEnc using the blur filter. A good TMPGEnc VCD template can be found under tools at the left of the screen.