Burning speed and more questions on making VCD

[yenly]

After browsing/reading through the older posts on this board...I have a few more questions regarding making VCD from VHS.

1) I read on a previous post that setting a too high burning speed will cause the picture to be jerky and unclear. However, setting too low of a burning speed will eventually ruin the CD-Driver. So what is the right speed to set? I believe right now VCDEasy on my computer is set at 4X.

2) I have noticed that the brightness of the VCDs I made changes from time to time. For example, after playing for a few minutes, the colors turn darker for a like 30 sec - 1 min and then it becomes brighter again. What do I do to eliminate this problem?

3) Does putting a 50 minute movie on a CD result in better quality than putting a 70 minute movie on a CD?

4) What other things can I do to have better quality on a VCD? Right now I just capture the movie from VHS through USB VideoBus II (using VirtualDub). Compression is PICVideo MJPEG Codec. Then use TMPGenc to convert the avi files to mpjeg. Use Merging & Cut tools to merge all the mpjeg files into 1 big file. Then Use VCDEasy to burn. The quality turns out average, but I just want to know if there is anything else I can do to make it better? I'm a beginner so if you have suggestions, please be specific.


Thx!!!

[shoplifter]

1) Never heard of burning to slow ruins the drive. I know alot of paranoid's, who burn theire audio-cds at 1x speed.

2)No clue. Is your vhs the same? Maybe a bad codec (see 4).

3)Wrong question. It has nothing to do with the source length. You can put a crappy 1min movie on a cd and its still crap. There are some tricky options to set the quality-level for the resulting mpeg (VCD) file. In general you raise or lower the bitrate (higher->better). So the same source encoded with high bitrate will have a bigger filesize, maybe larger than 700MB. You can either have a target filesize or target bitrate(quality).
If you want the movie to fit on one single cd you take a bitratecalculator and figure out the bitrate that brings a file to almost 700 MB. Then your 50min movie (source), because less material, can have a higher bitrate before reaching the 700MB limit = better quality than the 70min movie.
You can also experiment with the bitrate, decide that i.e. a bitrate of
1000 kbits/sec is appropriate for viewing, encode the movie and when its over 700MB split the file and put it on 2 discs. Either way, a higher bitrate makes a better quality makes a bigger filesize.

4)First: For best quality you have to capture your analog material with the huffyuv-codec (see Tools section) but be aware of bigger filesizes and higher system requirements with it and i guess more time for TMPGgenc to encode the movie, because more information (quality) is to process.
That will bring the biggest quality-boost.

Hope that helps!

*KEEP FILMING IT - I KEEP DOWNLOADING IT*