Can a VCD be as clear as VHS???

[rangerfan12]

I am taking movies from my DV Camcorder (Sony DCR TRV-120) and capturing them on my PC (AMD 1.4, 512 RAM, 40gig 7200 HD, Pyro DV Basic Firewire card) through my Firewire card.

I am capturing them through Pinnacle Studio 7 and I am capturing in DV format with 0 dropped frames. The resulting file is a fairly large AVI. (29.97 fps and 3000 bitrate) The resulting avi file looks good on the PC.

I then want to put the videos on VCD to be played in my DVD player (Sony DVP-NC600). I am able to burn them (I have tried Nero and Easy CD Creater). BUT the quality is less than the same seen that was capturted on VHS tape. It is grainy and is not real smooth. The sound is fine.

Why is that. I have tried letting Nero convert the files, having Pinnacle output the file in VCD format and I have tried TMPGEnc but I am getting the sale results.

Can someone please help me out? I have invested quite a bit of money in this so far (mostly based on my reading int he What is a VCD section that states the quality is comparable to VHS). I am not looking for DVD quality just something that looks like a VHS tape.
Thanks,
Bill

PS to all that post and comment....keep it up. This site is a diamond in the rough.

[TOMMO]

Hi, I have the same camcorder and firewire. Capturing in DV format througheither Ulead or Premiere, but the capture softweare does not really matter.

When I got mine, I thought great quality here we come. To be honest i was suprised that although good, it was not the remarkable leap I thought it was going to be.

I then tried again for SVCD, previous attempts through HI8 captures and a DC30Plus never worked for me satisfactorily. However, with the DV fottage the results were amazing.

My suggestion is work on converting to SVCD using TEMPEnc. The results should be to your satisfaction, well above VHS standard.

[Greg12]

I've gotten very good results with a template i made. I'll post it.

[spoon]

Tommo, you mention ULEAD... I have videoSudio 5. Do you notice a significant difference in quality between VideoStudio and TEMPEnc for SVCD?

[spoon]

Sorry, was not clear in my previous post... I have the DVD PlugIn for videoStudio 5. This makes it trival to create a SVCD. But if the quality is noticeably worse than with TEMPEnc, I will change my procedure.

[TOMMO]

SPOON -

I very rarely ever use any method of encoding now unless it is back into DV footage using Premiere or Ulead Media Studio Pro 6 or direct frameserving from Premiere to TEMPenc.

I too have a very good DVD template for TEMPEnc, but without a DVD writer it is useless. That is why I am at the moment going for SVCD.

[idoc]

Rangerfan12: I have almost same set-up as you, but use ULead Video Studio 5 and Nero 5.5.1.9. Burned 1 VCD of my D8 footage and was disappointed with blurry video when played on my Pioneer XV-HTD1 DVD Receiver. All the discs I made after that were SVCD. They look a lot better, but you use up twice as many CD-R's vs VCD.

[tendtend]

VCD can be as good as VHS or better than VHS, it depends on the video source. From my experience. DV source is good, but is not for VCD. Since the DV is in interlace format, while the VCD is in progressive format, so you can not expect a similar quality compared to those VHSs recorded from DV. On the other hand, I have watched some VCDs made in China with great quality (I do not see big difference compared with DVD). I heard those GREAT VCDs are encoded from film video source, though while they are also used for TV broadcast.

I recommend a SVCD format (35min per CD) for DV encodong. That's great and hard to see the difference from its original.

[branch]

I've seen some commercial cd's as well (vcd's for CDI) and they look bloody fantastic. I'd really like to know what program they are using to encode that... probably something which costs a fortune