how to make a VCD as close to an original VCD as possible

[pepehdez]

I'm no newbie but I'm no expert either, I can't make a VCD as good as the commercial ones. I know it's not possible, but how can I achieve to make a VCD as close as possible to the original in matter of audio and video quality. What should I use, how would I do it, which settings, etc.

Please Help.





<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: pepehdez on 2001-12-09 13:20:29 ]</font>

[pepehdez]

Help Please

[PhArAoH]

Use a Firewire card to capture video without any loss of quality. The captured video is a DV AVI format and the quality is identical to the original.
Then use some software to encode AVI to MPEG1(VCD format) and then burn it to CD.
I use Adobe Premiere to capture (and edit) my AVI's via Firewire from my SONY TRV320 digital camcorder, then convert them to MPEG1 with TMPGenc (free and much better than many commercial encoders) software and finally burn them to a VCD with Nero.

[stanwebber]

just copy the original vcd

[poopyhead]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-12-09 19:29:54, stanwebber wrote:
just copy the original vcd
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

hehehehehehe!!!!

something so obvious and yet so nebulous

btw...commercial VCDs are hardware encoded....software encodes are never gonna be as good as those encoded with $10,000 encoder cards....and if you want better video/audio quality try SVCD (higher resolution, higher video/audio bitrate)

[Flying Dutchman]

Given the fact that software encoders have all the time in the world to do it, why wouldn't they be just as good as hardware encoders? The VCD's I make "look" better than VHS rental tapes.

My experience is that it's just a matter of several optimizations:

1 - Excellent source material. PLEASE use a tripod if you shoot the material yourself. The less unwanted motion, the better the compression.

2- "Level" control. Make sure you use the entire CCIR 601 brightness range of 16-235. Adjust gamma if necessary.

3 - Carefully consider the deinterlacing process. Sometimes it's advantageous to do a "real" de-interlacing with interpolation, sometimes you're much better off killing the interlacing artefacts with a simple 2:1 size reduction. If motion is really extreme (infamous example: X-rated movies) a "true" de-interlacing will spoil the result with tons of mpeg motion artefacts.

4 - Good scaling. Bilinear, bicubic or a simple 2:1? It also depends on the source material. Often more sharpness means poorer encoding. Bicubic scaling sharpens the image a bit but also amplifies noise. Bilinear is less sharp but reduces noise. Use integer scaling factors wherever possible. Scaling a 720x576 video down to 352x288 gives sharper results if you scale it to 360x288 first and then chop off some pixels left and right.

5 - Movies in 2.35:1 format only fill half a conventional tv screen. Consider enlarging the image a bit, e.g. to 16:9 format.

6 - Noise reduction is a "MUST", especially if you use bicubic resizing. Virtualdub's "DNR" does miracles. Mpeg encoders really hate noise, it costs a lot of bandwidth. More available bandwidth means more sharpness and less artefacts.

7 - Know your input and encoder. Did you know that DV and DVD both already use the CCIR601 luminance range of 16-235? Most Mpeg encoders assume a range of 0-255 by default and hence reduce the contrast...