VCD playback issues

26th Jan 2006 04:42 #1

Member

Hi

I'm a newbie in video editing - just started to create DVD and VCDs of my travel shots from my miniDV cam (NTSC). I'm on a Mac PowerBook G4, 1G RAM, and I'm using iMovie 5.0.2 (I guess the latest one) to do the editing. I exported the edited movie to a full quality DV stream, and now trying to use that (a DV file of about 10G size) to create a DVD and a VCD - the movie length is about 46 minutes. My DVD player and TV are all PAL. So there's an issue of quality loss there - although I'm not sure how much it would affect.

I have been able to create a DVD using iDVD (from Apple) by just dragging the DV stream onto iDVD and letting iDVD do the rest - although I had to use the "best quality encoding" to remove the jerky playback on TV which happened when I did a normal encoding. The "best quality encoding" takes quite a while.

The problem is with the VCD - I'm using "ffmpeg" for encoding - encoding the DV stream to MPEG-1, using the standard VCD settings of ffmpeg - only changing the size to 352x288 (that's what I thought the size for PAL is). However, when the final video is produced, the playback (with QT or VLC) at "actual size" is fine, but "full screen" is pixelated - with less clarity. I created the VCD with Toast Titanium 7, and the playback on the TV was same - with less clarity.

I know I won't get the same quality as a DVD, but I thought I would get atleast the same quality as some standard VCD movies (brought from India - commercial movies) I have - but the quality I get is no where near that...Those commercial VCDs when played on the computer using QT or VLC and blown to full-screen has the same clarity as the tv playback.

Questions -

(1) There's a resolution setting in the video option of ffmpeg - which I set to 352x288. What about the size? Does it affect the playback quality?
(2) Does a conversion of NTSC to PAL cause any kind of kery playback (which I'm getting)?

Hoping for some guidance - thanx in advance,

Regards
Arijit

26th Jan 2006 05:48 #2

guns1inger

Always Watching

I would suggest the jerky playback is coming from the NTSC - PAL conversion. For DVD I suspect you could stay with NTSC, as your PAL equipment will, in all likelihood, play it back quite happily.

The same for the VCD. You probably don't need to do format conversion here either. Although I don't think it will fix you quality problem. VCD is a) low resolution - so blowing it up will always look bad, and b) low bitrate, so anything with action or low light etc will pixelate and look like crap. I have a number of commercial VCDs from a trip to asia many years ago, and they all exhibit the same problems.

If you are creating VCDs simply to reduce render time, then low quality will be the price you pay. Try keeping everything NTSC and you might be able to encode on a faster setting.