VCD Problems - Premiere 6.0 and Panasonic MPEG1

[liche]

Hello. I am having some problems with my MPEG1 encoding from the Panasonic MPEG1 plugin on my adobe premiere 6.0.

1. For titling, I use a fade-in / fade-out titling scheme on a black background. However, no matter what I do, the black background always as some type of blockiness and artifacts in it. Any help on how to clear this up????

2. Also, on all the transistions in the finished MPEG1 movie between two different movie clips, the beginning of the next clip sound repeats twice (for about 1 second). When i mean transitions, i just mean simple cut transistions. Any idea why this is occuring???

Any help is appreciated. Thanks
Liche

[mzidanic]

I've recently tested a number of approaches to achieve the highest quality menus for my vcds. I had been doing fade-in/fade-outs of a Premiere-composed title (240x320), exporting to AVI (PicVideo codec) and then converting to mpeg-1 with TMPGenc. That works fine except that the letters come out a little blurry. The blurriness is introduced in the AVI, so there's nothing tmpgenc can do about it. I thought, well, let's try higher res titles, e.g., 252x320, 704x320, 704x640, 720x640, and they all produced blurry AVIs, even at 18-20 quality setting of PicVideo encoder. Not only that, but during the fade-in or fade-out i would get a single frame here and there that was shifted vertically.

I also tried outputting directly to mpeg-1 with the EZ-Cleaner plug-in. That produced crisper letters, but there was somethig else wrong with the image, can't remember exactly. Maybe your having a similar problem with the Panasonic plug-in.

The one way I've found that encodes a very crisp image is to create a .bmp with PhotoShop and to let tmpgenc encode it to mpeg-1 (with or without a wav file). Since this is non-vcd compliant, you need to put it in the SPI (segment play area) and use VCDImager to program the PBC menu. But it is worth the time to read the XML description, cause then you have complete control of the DVD remote with menus and chapters. I found that TSCV has a few bugs, so I started with something it created, then edited it with a text editor to customize it.

Here's where I'd like to get some advice:

What I want to do is have a single still frame with my menu, but have audio playing in the background. But since there is no video motion, I'm wondering if there is a way to encode this into an mpg-1 that isn't any much larger than an "audio-only" mpg. If I put the .bmp in the video selection box and a .wav in the audio box and do standard encoding, I get a file size that is as big as if I had full motion video throughout the audio timeframe. What a waste of video frames.

Any ideas?

thanks,
mike