120MIN 8mm/Hi8 home video backup to XSVCD 2CD

[vcd2002a]

I have been reading the posts and trying different methods for 6 months.

With the help of messages posted by others and my trials, I finally settled with the following procedures to make XSVCDs of home made video (8mm and Hi8 tapes) to fit about 65Min video to 650MB CDR or about 70Min video to 700MB CDR with good quality (very subjective, mine is on 32" TV and I am picky as far as picture quality is concerned).

If some of the terms sound unfamiliar to you, please read other messages to learn more.

The home video characteristics:

(1) Don't need high quality sound for the final XSVCD.
(2) Most of the scenes consist of complex images (when I see a good view, I use my camcorder…)
(3) Not too much motion in the video (If you move your camcorder too fast and have headache to watch it on the TV, you are not doing the right thing…)
(4) The video source is not that clean even using the S-Video port, therefore noise removal will be helpful.

My hardware is PIII 866MHz with 256MB mem, 7200rpm 40G hard drive, Win2000 Pro, ATI AIW 128 Pro.

With MMC 7.6 and Stinky's REG Tools, here is how I do it:

(1) For MMC 7.6, create a capture profile, call it "XSVCD Direct", MPEG2, 352x480, Sound 8bit Mono, check deinterlace, visualmask.
(2) Check VBR, set bit rate to 1.5Mbps and Most Estimation to 100.
(3) Use the default IPB setting which is P=4, B=2.
(4) Use Stinky's REG Tools to edit the MMC profile. Move all the denoise slide bars to 20.
(5) Use Stinky's REG Tools to set Quality to 3 and X=256, Y=128 for motion search.
(6) Capture your video using S-Video port.
(7) Use DVD2AVI to preview the captured video (Why? It is fast and it reads MPEG2 capture. Also because TMPGEnc's Merge and Cut does not allow me to see the pictures.) Open the statistics window. Move through your video clip quickly to find areas with a lot of blockness. You don't need them and they are not good for playing on TV using the tape either. Take down the time stamps associated with those "bad segments".
(8) Use TMPGEnc's MPEG Tools, select Merge and Cut, select "MPEG-2 Super VideoCD (VBR)" profile. Load your clip, cut and merge to make the final clip. Even you don't have anything to be cut out, you have to go through this step. Otherwise, Nero will not burn your 800MB or so data to 80Min CDR.
(9) Burn with Nero.
(10) That's it.



Benefits:

(1) Real time capture and MPEG encoding. I have done quite a number of overnight TMPGEnc encoding to make some VCDs and SVCDs. It is no fun…
(2) Once you have the video, you can add subtitle, add more sound tracks, add chapters later…
(3) You must be thinking this way you are losing picture quality compared to capture high resolution with I frame only then using TMPGEnc to encode. NO. I have tried many, many times captures and TMPGEnc encodings, except for very fast scenes which are cut out before burn, the picture quality is similar . The only thing I am not sure is KWAG's profile which uses CQ=75 for TMPGEnc, which gives balanced encoding for faster scenes and good pictures at comparable bit rate.

My earlier work was focused on using TMPGEnc, MMC 7.1 and 7.2. I was happy with the picture quality using 480x480 I frame only 8Mbps capturing and standard SVCD encoding. But that gives about 35Min on 650MB CDR. I tried to reduce the video source information rate by noise removal (VirtualDub, Avisynth, TMPGEnc), and force film. None of them seem to be effective enough. The force film is a nice concept but I ran into audio sync problems.

Hope this will help some.

[energy80s]

Why capture audio in 8 bit format? No, grab it in 16 bit 44.1kHz mono (or stereo if your source is stereo). It's pointless sacrificing decent sound for a small saving in disc space.

[vcd2002a]

My old tapes had mono sound. The new Hi8 has stereo sound. But for home video the sound is not important. The video is important. I can remix the video with other sound sources since SVCD supports multi channel audios. I think with the proposed capture method, I can fit 60Min video + 2 stereo audios onto an 80Min CDR.

Also, I think we are not too far away from cheap DVD burner and DVD-R discs. With 352x480 capture which is recognized as D1 resolution on DVD players, I will be able to fit multiple current XSVCDs to one DVD-R with AC3 sound down the road. There are several guides here to show how to do this but I just think the DVD-R is still too expensive at this moment.

[thomusic]

I have been reading the posts and trying different methods for 6 months.

With the help of messages posted by others and my trials, I finally settled with the following procedures to make XSVCDs of home made video (8mm and Hi8 tapes) to fit about 65Min video to 650MB CDR or about 70Min video to 700MB CDR with good quality (very subjective, mine is on 32" TV and I am picky as far as picture quality is concerned).

If some of the terms sound unfamiliar to you, please read other messages to learn more.

The home video characteristics:

(1) Don't need high quality sound for the final XSVCD.
(2) Most of the scenes consist of complex images (when I see a good view, I use my camcorder…)
(3) Not too much motion in the video (If you move your camcorder too fast and have headache to watch it on the TV, you are not doing the right thing…)
(4) The video source is not that clean even using the S-Video port, therefore noise removal will be helpful.

My hardware is PIII 866MHz with 256MB mem, 7200rpm 40G hard drive, Win2000 Pro, ATI AIW 128 Pro.

With MMC 7.6 and Stinky's REG Tools, here is how I do it:

(1) For MMC 7.6, create a capture profile, call it "XSVCD Direct", MPEG2, 352x480, Sound 8bit Mono, check deinterlace, visualmask.
(2) Check VBR, set bit rate to 1.5Mbps and Most Estimation to 100.
(3) Use the default IPB setting which is P=4, B=2.
(4) Use Stinky's REG Tools to edit the MMC profile. Move all the denoise slide bars to 20.
(5) Use Stinky's REG Tools to set Quality to 3 and X=256, Y=128 for motion search.
(6) Capture your video using S-Video port.
(7) Use DVD2AVI to preview the captured video (Why? It is fast and it reads MPEG2 capture. Also because TMPGEnc's Merge and Cut does not allow me to see the pictures.) Open the statistics window. Move through your video clip quickly to find areas with a lot of blockness. You don't need them and they are not good for playing on TV using the tape either. Take down the time stamps associated with those "bad segments".
(8) Use TMPGEnc's MPEG Tools, select Merge and Cut, select "MPEG-2 Super VideoCD (VBR)" profile. Load your clip, cut and merge to make the final clip. Even you don't have anything to be cut out, you have to go through this step. Otherwise, Nero will not burn your 800MB or so data to 80Min CDR.
(9) Burn with Nero.
(10) That's it.



Benefits:

(1) Real time capture and MPEG encoding. I have done quite a number of overnight TMPGEnc encoding to make some VCDs and SVCDs. It is no fun…
(2) Once you have the video, you can add subtitle, add more sound tracks, add chapters later…
(3) You must be thinking this way you are losing picture quality compared to capture high resolution with I frame only then using TMPGEnc to encode. NO. I have tried many, many times captures and TMPGEnc encodings, except for very fast scenes which are cut out before burn, the picture quality is similar . The only thing I am not sure is KWAG's profile which uses CQ=75 for TMPGEnc, which gives balanced encoding for faster scenes and good pictures at comparable bit rate.

My earlier work was focused on using TMPGEnc, MMC 7.1 and 7.2. I was happy with the picture quality using 480x480 I frame only 8Mbps capturing and standard SVCD encoding. But that gives about 35Min on 650MB CDR. I tried to reduce the video source information rate by noise removal (VirtualDub, Avisynth, TMPGEnc), and force film. None of them seem to be effective enough. The force film is a nice concept but I ran into audio sync problems.

Hope this will help some.

I TRY'D to do svcd and vcd without a real good kwality
wenn i copy my dv tape on a vhs tape the quality is even better
what do i wrong ???????????

is this working
witch program do i need ???????
thomusic@home.nl

[wi_video_guy]

Sounds Great I might just test it and see how it works. Only have a few questions. What version of TMPGEnc are you using? What settings are you using for max capture size? exmple 80min VCD, Etc.... Does Stinky's reg tool give you an error turning of manager?
Any other input would help me alot!
If you want to email me directly at axsmedia@centurytel.net or call me 715-336-3220.
Thanks,
Smokin Joe