VCD file to DVD. Render them de-interlaced progressive?

[ShaneJensen]

First and foremost I want to say that I use Vegas 6.0 for my video editing and DVD Architect 3.0 for my DVD authoring.

I have a bunch of MPEGs of videos and clips in the VCD format. I'm authoring them to DVDs because I don't like VCDs and I want to render them all out to one file with the videos in a specific order with menus and all that good stuff that comes with a neatly authored DVD.

Now the big question. I understand that VCD files are rendered de-interlaced or progressive. When I render out my VCD MPEG files to a finished MPEG2 file ready for DVD authoring, should I render it out as a de-interlaced progressive since the source is progressive? I remember someone on here a while back telling me that I should render whatever the source is. If the source is interlaced I should render out interlaced and let my DVD player or TV do the de-interlacing. Only de-interlace if the source is already de-interlaced.

So what should I do?

[junkmalle]

VCD is progressive. Keep the video progressive.

There isn't any need to re-render at all though (unless you also need PAL/NTSC conversion). VCD frame size, frame rate, and MPEG1 are DVD compliant. You need to change the audio from 44.1KHz to 48KHz to be completely within spec but most players will play the VCD audio without conversion.

[ShaneJensen]

VCD is progressive. Keep the video progressive.

There isn't any need to re-render at all though (unless you also need PAL/NTSC conversion). VCD frame size, frame rate, and MPEG1 are DVD compliant. You need to change the audio from 44.1KHz to 48KHz to be completely within spec but most players will play the VCD audio without conversion.

Thank you.

I do need to reconvert them, though, because there is a lot of editing that I do. I trim ends, I do color correction, brightness & contrast, and all of that other stuff. I also replace the audio tracks with cleaner versions from other sources. Such as if I'm editing a music video I get an audio file from the actual song and sync that with the audio on the video. I then render out audio tracks to waves separately from the video because when I do the DVD authoring I have the audio converted to AC3 in DVD Architect. I have it done straight from the WAV rather than from within the MPEG2 file so that it doesn't get compressed twice.

[non-linear]

I actually did some editing of VCD files for DVD (mainly getting the black levels set right). I find the best thing to do is encode them as MPEG-2, 1/4 D1 (352x240), since there's really no benefit to increasing the resolution.

BTW, I did the MPEG encoding in TMPGEnc, using Debugmode Frameserver to feed the timeline out without needing to make a big MPEG file. I don't do MPEG encoding in Vegas, so I don't know if it'll support 1/4 D1 resolution.