vcd/svcd, quality with ulead video studio 6

[bigballs]

I have captured some dv to my pc with a firewire connection into video studio 6. When I convert the video to a vcd/svcd the quality is awful, really blocky. Any help with this would be helpful

[bunyip]

Unfortunately the renderer in VS6 generally doesn't do a good job on VCD or SVCD (it is good on high-res, high bit-rate DVD though) add to this the fact that DV is already lossy-compressed at about 10:1 and you're fighting a losing battle.

However there are some techniques to improve the quality.

You don't say what you are capturing to (DV, AVI, MPG ?).

The trick with VS6 capture is not to capture in realtime VCD or SVCD, capture in as high a bit-rate and as high a resolution as your system will allow. If you have the disk space capture in AVI otherwise capture as the highest possible DVD quality MPEG - then use the output options to render as VCD or SVCD - this way the renderer will do a slower but better job.

The result probably still won't be as good as rendering with somthing like TMPGEnc but it will be better than realtime capture/render.

Another option is to render the raw capture outside of VS6 with another product, then import the rendered file back into VS, do any editing or affects processing then 'smart-render' it to the final version, this way VS will only render the bits that you edited and leave the rest alone.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Hey bigballs,
Have you d/l the patch dated 11/28/02?It really makes a differance when capturing and encoding.Make sure to set all of your profiles to QUALITY.

[bigballs]

Thanks for a great reply. Im pretty new to this, I only got my camera in January. Im not really sure in what format to capture. I tried running the mpeg I made in vs6 through tmpge, but it wasnt any better, yet when I run the raw dv though my pc or tv its faultless, the best quality I have ever seen from a camera. Maybe I need to find a idiots guide.

[MOVIEGEEK]

In Capture>Options>Video Capture select YUY2,720x576.
I think it looks better than RGB24.

[Rich927]

If you are using VS6 and capturing via DV-Firewire, I would suggest capturing and editing in DV-Avi format before you convert to MPG-1 and burn. MPG is a Lossy format and you can lose some quality while editing.

[Buffist]

Maybe you'll give the Ulead Video Server (www.videotools.net) a try and frameserve to TMPGEnc. I'm doing this with good to very good results...