Argh! My vcd's look decent but are very choppy!

[twist0105]

Ok, I need your expert advice out there. I am making some videoCDs of my favorite show, taped off TV and digitized with a Dazzle. I know the quality of VCD won't be the best, but to be honest, it looks pretty good, considering the source material. I do the highest Motion search and noise reductions as I compress in TMPGEnc, and the quality, while a tad fuzzy, is more than satisfactory. (I should add that the dazzle files look fine, do not have the problem I describe below.) However...

The file that tmpgenc outputs has horrible (IMHO) jerkiness when it encounters motion. Still scenes look fine, characters talking look fine... but when the camera pans or someone runs across the room, the video becomes jumpy - it almost seems like i skip every other half second of video. It is noticible. I have played with various settings to no avail; it is visually distracting to watch.

Now, I am building a media pc for final storage, so I am not tied into the VCD setting (i can increase bitrate, as long as I stay with MPEG1)... but so far, I have had no luck, even with absurd bitrates - image quality and artifact are well within my tolerable limits, its just this damn jumpiness.

Any advice?

Edit: The picture LOOKS fine during these problems - it is not an interlacing problem...

[vitualis]

It sounds like you may be accidentally doing a framerate conversion?

Regards.

[rhegedus]

http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=120405&highlight=

[twist0105]

Hmmmm.

Well, I have sort of figured out my problem. TMPGenc was indeed attempting to do a framerate conversion, thats why they were choppy. However... I had set the framerate properly. In fact, I noticed that in subsequent attempts, it was also zooming into the picture as well. The thing that I don't get - I made sure I set the framerate, aspect ratio, clip size, and so on before I hit Start... each time I check this stuff (who wants a 5 hour conversion to go wrong?)

It would seem TMPG is not applying my settings. I did it on another computer, and while it took twice as long, it worked perfectly. Dunno, maybe something got screwed up in TMPGEnc. Anyone ever have something like this happen?

Rebooted, trying again...