svcd quality issues

[catkinson]

I have a problem where my SVCDs look worse than vhs tapes. I am new to the stuff. My camera is a Sony digital pc100 with a frame rate of 29.97fps ntsc. I use the 1394 interface to capture into videowave or premeire. (Mostly videowave since it is simplier for me to use). The raw AVI quality is great. Anyway, I end up producing in MPEG-2 in videowave and then using tmpenc to convert to the "standard" svcd format. I then use ULEAD Movie Factory to make the menus and burn the MPGs.

The quality has ended up bad. I was wondering if anyone could give me any suggestions as the best process to get the most quality SVCD?

Thanks.

[macleod]

sounds like you are putting it through too many processes. Have you tried to use TMPGENC to convert the AVI file without having it go through your other software? The avi file will look great because it is just about uncompressed. When you go to the mpeg'ish files, you are dealing with compression. Try to convert the AVI to mpeg 2 through TMPGENC and see how that looks.

Videowave hasnt given me good results when converting to mpeg 2(actually, I trying to remember if it actually does that, I think it only does mpeg 1). What is more than likely happening is you do your initial shot in semi-uncompressed AVI, which looks great. Then you encode using video wave (I'm gonna take a stab at saying mpeg 1 here) which crams down the bit rate to a low number. Then you use TMPGENC to encode it again to make it SVCD compliant.

Another questions is, what it the bit rate and resolution size when it is in videowave. Probably not what you are trying to do in TMPGENC (true SVCD compliance).

[catkinson]

Thanks, that sounds right. Videowave does do MPEG-2... at least that is what the menu says. I don't have it right now or I could give the specs. How do I cut and add music without having to convert? Is there way to cut, edit, add music while keeping the video in raw AVI format? Is there another program that does this?

Thanks!

[cartamy]

Catkinson - sounds like you are following the same trail that I did. I also use Videowave because it came with my camcorder and I found it easier to use. The only difference is I am encoding to mpeg-1 (VCD) so that I can share home video with family members who cover the spectrum in computer/video hardware; VCD's can be played by everyone. I found that "producing" to mpeg-1 in Videowave not only gave inferior quality to tmpgenc but larger file sizes as well! You may already know that you can cut and edit in tmpgenc but I can't help as far as adding music. If you know how to do that in Videowave, you can "produce" it to the template called DV. It's description, once you bring it up, actually says DV-AVI. Maybe you can "produce" with your added music to the DV template, keep the quality, then encode with tmpgenc. The only downside there is I tried producing to DV a few times and found that it took a REALLY long time to complete on my 900 mhz computer.