LD Capture to CVD question

[Tiernan]

Quick summary:
Captured 1 side (~57:00) 2.35 NTSC LD (via S-Video into Visiontek Xtasy Everything)in VDub (704X480 Picvideo(19) 44/16/s(PCM) - no filters/masks; AVI=~3 GB) Used various templates (CVD, altered default SVCD, XVCD) to try and generate a CVD "standard" file that would fit on one 80min CD, with the least amount of instability/artifacts in the resulting CVD. Unfortunately, have had problems with 1)resulting file sizes being considerably bigger than "projected" by TMPEGEnc 2)continued blockiness/instability (particulary around titles) and 3)a need to lower the average bitrate to ~1710+ in order to get the file to even BEGIN to fit on a 80min CD (while still maintaining CVD specs (and hopefully D1/2 compatability)).

Question: given that there is, of course, only ~1/3 of the screen being used, should this not result in a smaller file, as less data/lower bitrates should be needed to represent this particular 57 minutes? If not, where IS the bitrate/bitstream going? Having already done a considerable number of fullscreen caps (in the approximate same length), it seemed only reasonable that a widescreen cap should result in small filesizes and/or more flexability about how much could fit on one disc. Is this not the case?

Any suggestions?

[VidGuy]

One suggestion when doing widescreen video captures - use borders. You can almost always safely use a border on the top, and if there are no subtitles, you can use then on the bottom.

You can use the "Crop" and "AddBorders" of AviSynth to do this, not sure how to do it with VDub.

The borders of a video capture are not "clean", so use up more bandwidth than they should. Cropping them out and adding clean borders should help.

Of course, bitrate is bitrate and what your resolution is doesn't matter. Using the bitrate calculator, assuming a 224 Kb/s audio stream, you must use 1673 kb/s as your average bitrate.

Personally, I would use TMPGEnc CQ mode, probably at around 50-55 to try and get a decent quality picture. (obviously adjust the 50-55 depending on the size you get).

[SatStorm]

Impossible, sorry...
If you have a 16:9 source, then by cropping the borders with TMPGenc and using an average of 2000kb/s you can success good (not perfect) quality, the xCVD way (minimum 1000, maximum 3000).
It is always better to crop with TMPGenc if you encode with this proggy, than to frameserve a cropped image to it, for various reasons.

The use of some filters with vdub (static noise reduction, 2dcleaner in a really very low value, video denoise...) gonna help not the visuall appearance of the source, but the encoding proccess, with gaps/probs and other stuff our eyes can't see but the encoder do, and which they distroy the correct pixel allocation per field... This is something most users don't realise: filters ain't only for what we see, it is also for what we can't see but the encoders do see, their own way...

You can do all those tricks with avisynth, faster that way, but no preview! Vdub offers preview to anything and personally, that helps me a lot. There are ways to convert the vdub job to avisyth, to gain some time during the encoding proccess, but personally I don't bother. 10 minute faster, ain't an issue for me.

Back to your goal:
The best alternative I can see for your case, is to use 99min CDs with a higher average bitrate, about 2300kb/s.