How to convert from DV to SVCD/VCD?

[ChilliNr1]

Hi,

I have a big problem: I want to get my Holiday Video from my DV-Camera in a DVD-Player readable format and on 1 or 2 CD`s. But I don`t have any plan how to do. I have a Panasonic DV-Camera, Adobe Premiere (it`s not the best, I know), a Firewire-Card and a PIII 650Mhz. With the Firewire-Card, I can put the Film over to my Harddisk with 3,5MB/s. But this is a lot of Gigs coming together in a short time. How can I get the Film smaller? Which codec is a good one? And can I burn the Film on a VCD/SVCD with Nero? Thx for your help.

[Bree]

OK, its sound like you have the hardware to do the job, but you didn't specify ho big you hard drive was. This will ultimately limit the clip size that you can copy over via firewire and process. Yes, you can encode the DV to VCD/SVCD to be show on your DVD player(assuming it reads VCDs/SVCDs). Use Adobe Premire to "capture" from the DV camera. Then you can edit the clip as you like. Then you can frameserve from within Premire with Avisynth plug-in. Or save the movie as a DV or some other losses codec AVI (huffyuv) and frameserve the file with VirtualDub. In either case you can then use TMPEG to encode the movie as a VCD/SVCD. Lastly, burn the VCD/SVCD with NERO. Made several SVCDs from DV, and the quality is outstanding. At very high quality you can get 30-40min in SVCD format. I would not recommend VCDs because you lose too much of the excellent quality that a DV film has to offer.

[ChilliNr1]

Ok, thanks a lot. I will try it. I have 6 gigs on my harddisk free. I think it`s enough
Thx Chilli!

[HaZee]

Bree,

I'm trying the same but still no luck in finding the right settings (quality no better then VHS). Can you please post some info about the settings you use????

[EricB]

ChilliNr1: 6 gigs is 25.5 minutes of DV video and that leaves no space for temporary files needed in editing and converting. Depending on the length of your final piece, you might consider getting a bigger drive.

HaZee: The default template in TMPGenc for SVCD does a great job with DV. Just set the motion quality to as high as you require (or can stand). Assuming your DV footage doesn't have a lot of noise (low light, poor quality), the resulting SVCD should be great.

[ChilliNr1]

Oh,
ok! I will see to get more free space on my Disk. I got a 40 Gig-Disk, but the Partitions are only 6 Gigs. So I have to work a little. But that`s no Problem. Thanks a lot!

[tilemanit]

Some items maybe you can help with:

I capture DV with Ulead program. DV capture is to DV-AVI format. Max file size appears to be 4GB or about 19 minutes. This may be limitation of win98. I also have not been able to copy files greater than 2 GB from one drive to another. They can be moved within the drive but not to a different drive letter. When creating the VCD file, I lose a lot of the quality of the video, (lots of squares). I have purchased VCDs in Asia and they look great but I can't duplicate the quality. Any ideas? Should I be using a different codec to creat the VCD MPEG-1 format file instead of the ligos codec used by Ulead?

thanks,
e-mail at tilemanit@aol.com

[EricB]

tilemanit:

The encoder in ULEAD is decent but not great. Try capturing your video and leaving it in DV format. Then encode using TMPGenc. If your player will support XVCD, then boost the video rate some and you can get pretty good results.

I believe the key to commercial VCDs is the great source material they start with, followed by expensive professional level encoding. Most of my source material has noise (either cable TV or home videos) and the VCD has to waste bandwidth encoding this material. The solution is to go up to SVCD which has the data rates needed to handle the non-perfect source material.

[biggdogg]

having trouble getting from mpeg to vcd to play on my dvd player. using ati all in wonder card and the steps on help vcd site under capture.with all in wonder it works on my media player great whats the next step......help

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On 2001-12-10 13:39:18, biggdogg wrote:
having trouble getting from mpeg to vcd to play on my dvd player. using ati all in wonder card and the steps on help vcd site under capture.with all in wonder it works on my media player great whats the next step......help
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Is your stand alone dvd compatible with cd-r's and able to play vcd? Some aren't, check for your model under the compatibility link to your left...