Hi, Sorry for the mini-epic but hopefully this is all the info!! I've been playing with various settings but haven't been able to crack the ones that I think get the best quality out of the format.

I'm capping a PAL anamorphic signal from digital satellite using an ATI AIW128 using Vdub @ 704 x 576 using the PICVideo MJPEG codec with quality settings of 18. I take that avi, trim the black edges off and deinterlace using Gunnar Thalins area based deinterlacer. Threshold is set at 27 with Edge Detect set at 35 with interpolation rather than blend being selected.
I then perform bicubic resizing to 480x576 using the built in vdub filter. I then frameserve the avi to TMPGEnc 1.2a (newer versions crash when I try frameserving to them). I select the standard PAL SVCD template but use TMPGEnc's Edge Enhancement at a setting of +40 to try and sharpen the edges in the video. I want to retain the anamorphic nature of the transmission for playback on my widescreen TV so have not opted to letterbox my image.

What I get is a fairly OK looking encode (not sharpened to the extent I was expecting) but I seem to have introduced an unwanted "enhancement" which I would describe as an occasional Jumping or stepping of the video. It seems to be fairly random and is noticable when watching the svcd on my pioneer DVD player but there isn't a jump in the sound and dropped frames shouldn't be an issue (only dropped at 14 frames in 40 mins of video on capture).

Any ideas what I might be doing wrong from my processing settings and what the actual artifact I've introduced is best described as?

cheers

Jon