High Quality VCD creation

[Serville]

How do I produce a high-quality VCD with minimum pixelation and noises.
I've tried so many programs, encoders, but the result is still not very satisfactory. Pixelation seems very noticable.

Some original VCDs produced for company's profile, or commercial movies seems to be much higher quality. I hardly see pixelation and the picture is very sharp for VCD quality, but they are mostly playable in normal VCD player without much compatibilty problem.

Is there any trick ?

[FulciLives]

VCD is a shit ass format and very old at that.

VCD just is not worth it and it will always look like crap.

DVD burners and DVD blanks are very cheap now.

Move on.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[lumis]

hardware based mpeg-1 encoder.

the terapin vcd recorder is a pretty inexpensive one, which produces pretty good quality. ($100-$200 used).

[lumis]

VCD is a shit ass format and very old at that.

VCD just is not worth it and it will always look like crap.

DVD burners and DVD blanks are very cheap now.

Move on.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

settle down.

[mats.hogberg]

As the VCD standard is pretty limited, the end result mainly relies on good source material.

/Mats

[Cole]

If you are going to watch your VCDs on a small television screen then you can get away with much more than if you are going to watch on a large television; on a large television most (if not all) VCDs won't look particularly good; pretty much what a VHS looks like, I suppose.

In the past, to avoid any pixellation, I would have raised the bitrate in the encode process to as high as would allow me to fit onto the disc; in effect making it an xVCD.

I have only ever seen one commercial VCD (Conspiracy Theory) and that did pixellate at times quite badly, so professional VCDs can suffer this problem too.

[jman98]

Actually, recent VCDs can be of surprisingly high quality. I was shocked. Just 4 or 5 years ago, anything on VCD that wasn't a cartoon was pretty much crap. That's not true now. I suspect it is due to 2 things. 1) I suspect that the encoders have improved in quality. 2) I noticed that just about all VCDs are now letterboxed. I think this has made a huge difference in quality. The encoder doesn't have to waste precious bits on the black bars, so it can devote more bits to the image itself. VCDs these days are good enough that I sometimes buy them of Asian films if I just want to see the film and don't really care about seeing it in as good quality as possible.

The better your source, the better your results will be. If it is at all possible, try to encode your video as letterboxed as that will result in higher quality since, as I said, there will be more bits to spread over a smaller image.

[vitualis]

Agreed.

On good quality source and a high quality encoder you can make pretty good quality VCDs. I would contend that VCD video quality can be as good as VHS and it doesn't degrade. Audio quality is near-CD.

Regards.

[jtoolman2000]

How do I produce a high-quality VCD with minimum pixelation and noises

Is there actually such a thing?

I have seen some Phillipine produced movies that are of course on VCD which is still very prevalent in those regions and they are almost always split into several Disks. There is no such thing as a full movie on a single disk. Even divs or xvid will look degraded. Why on earth would you want to persue this when DVD backups are super cheap and easy to produce today.

[Cornucopia]

There are a few tricks, but they're not any secret:

1. Use a VERY HIGH QUALITY SOURCE. Film transferred to Uncompr/LLCompr 4:2:2 HD YUV is best, then HD source, then SD, then DV compressed, etc.

2. Use the 24fps (actually 23.976) framerate, if the source was recorded that way. Much bitrate savings/efficiency there.

3. Use a progressive source, if possible, as VCD is progressive (only 1 field per frame).

4. Use a VHQ (see above) scaler to convert from HD or D1 size down to 1/4 D1 (aka SIF size). High precision BiLinear/BiCubic/Lanczos algorithms are good places to start.

5. If your footage is widescreen, and you can apply letterboxing in the encoder along with customized Q matrix settings, then do as previously suggested and letterbox it. It'll make the remaining video be encoded more efficiently. Make sure your letterboxing # of lines is a proper multiple of 8 or 16 (as per MPEG macroblock requirements), otherwise there will be some loss in efficiency.

6. Judiciously apply noise reduction processing (Gaussian blur, USM, Global Luminance averaging/antiflicker, posterization, motion blur, etc.) AS NEEDED. This can be tried BEFORE or AFTER scaling/resizing, with different results.

7. Use a VHQ MPEG1-optimized encoder. I like TMPGEnc, but Mainconcept and Panasonic (and maybe even BBMPEG) are good.

8. If you can do VBR (when xVCD is allowable), use (2-pass) VBR for maximizing quality for the given Average bitrate. When only CBR is allowable, try 2-pass there also if you can, as there may be some optimization with the motion search.

9. Use the VHQ motion search precision available. It may take extra time and not be a huge difference in quality from the next step down, but every bit counts!

10. Maximize the efficiency of your GOP structure and Q-matrices. Use I, B, and P frametypes. Use Open-GOPs when allowable. Deselect "detect scene change" and MANUALLY apply ("Force") Frame types, Q, frame quality, etc. on specific frames. The KVCD templates have some good examples of this type of optimization, although they usually result in xVCD streams.

11. If different encoders work better on different sections, encode those sections and then later JOIN the sections together. WATCH your bitrate settings here, as you might end up with an unwanted VBR file.

That's probably enough for now...

Scott

[mats.hogberg]

There is no such thing as a full movie on a single disk.

Yes there is. With VCD, being fixed @ 1150 kbps (some claim lower is also allowed, but who'd want that? ) anything <80 minutes will work with one disc. Anything > 1 disc won't fit, and has to be split in two or more. Simple maths.

/Mats

[jman98]

Cornucopia - I just wanted to thank you for taking the time for that post. It was larger than most posts and that was quite possibly the most informative VCD post I have ever seen. You da man!!!

[rds_correia]

There is no such thing as a full movie on a single disk.

Yes, there is
But it takes some time and knowledge to do it

Cheers.

[vitualis]

Well, if we are talking about White Book standards compliant VCDs, only those films shorter than 80 minutes can fit on a single disc (unless you overburn or use 90 or 99 min blanks).

Regards.