movie looks bad after burn to svcd

[Larrycleve]

I have a Sony digital 8 trv480 camcorder. I transferred to a pc using firewire. The pc is winxp with 512 mg ram with an external hard drive of 120 gig capacity. I've used Powerdirector4, windv, and sceneanalyzer for capture with both avi or mpeg formats. While it's capturing and during playback the video screen shows the movie faded and unatural looking. The thumbnails show an excellent picture. When viewing on tv after burning to a cd with svcd format the picture is faded with much pixilation. It looks very bad, unatural. and hard to watch. If I connect the camcorder directly to the tv or record to vcr tape with an av connection the picture is excellent. What am I doing wrong and any suggestions on how to fix this? Thanks.

[Baldrick]

copy the dv with windv.
convert to svcd with tmpgenc,mainconcept mpeg encoder,canopus procoder or cce basic. be sure to leave it interlaced. use highest bitrate for best quality.
author to a svcd with vcdeasy.


all-in-one solutions are not best if you want good quality.

[Larrycleve]

Thank you for your help. The suggestions gave me an excellent video. A couple of follow up questions. Why would major companies make crapware? I bought power director 4 based on recommendations from another web site that said it was the best video editing software. It was a total waste of money. The programs you suggested are cheaper and provide better results. Also is there a program where you can reliably watch the finished video on the pc? Viewing on power dvd gives a cartoonish appearance. It looks fine as a thumbnail. It would be nice to view it realistically on the pc before before encoding and burning to cd. Thanks again!

[Nelson37]

Looking at a thumbnail to determine video quality is like figuring out how food will taste by looking at a picture of it. Useless.

The step where most quality is lost is in the encoding of the AVI to MPG. This would be the step where you gave no info at all about your process.

This would also be the step you changed when using TMPGENC, or one of the other encoders mentioned. BTW, precisely which one was it which gave you the improved results?

A good editing program is not necessarily a good encoder, or a good capturing program. Manufacturers recommed this crapware because if they actually detailed the multiple procedures, and multiple programs, needed for best quality no one would purchase the product. Also, they can't make any money selling freeware, which many of the best progs are.

There are a number of technical differences between the PC monitor and a television which make a PC preview not a good indicator of final TV output quality. After you learn to distinguish these, then you can take them into account for the preview effect. Any DVD player software should suffice.

PC display is not natively interlaced, is typically darker overall, has blacker blacks and better color saturation than your TV will show. Note that some of these problems are also present when using a TV-out on the PC to preview on a TV. Try playing a final output file on the PC while at the same time viewing from DVD standalone on the TV. Do this with several different videos, you will soon see the differences.

[Larrycleve]

I used video encoder xpress. I set things to the highest quality settings so it took 6 hours to encode 15 minutes of video. I guess it would be quicker with lower settings. Part of the problem was that this was a new camcorder and I didn't know all the settings. The video was shot on a bright sunny day and I didn't compensate for it so the colors on the original are faded. I also moved the camera too quickly so it caused motion problems.

[Nelson37]

Got one word for you.

TRIPOD

Get one. Use it. Learn to love it. Don't leave home without it.

[ZippyP.]

Why would major companies make crapware?

Why does any major company sell poor quality products?

Greed, foolishness, poor planning, rushing a product to market, lack of expertise, bad management, bad designers, bad programmers/builders...the list is endless.