What is better capture in full PAL and than resize or...

[mirh]

What is better to capture directly in SVCD resolution or to capture full Pal resolution and than using VirtualDub resize it to SVCD? What method of resizing brings better picture quality hardware (TV card Conexant bt87 or soft. I’m asking cause my PC is rather weak now and I can’t check it myself.
I use 8mm camcorder and I’m wonder what it is the resolution of the original source? Does it make sense to capture in full Pal or SVCD if resolution is lesser. Is it better to capture in max 8mm resolution and than burn XSVCD (I assume that 8mm camcorder resolution is bigger than VCD)? In that case the chip in my DVD will resize to full Pall on the TV screen.
I would like to make the best possible quality SVCD from my movies.
Sorry for my bad English....
Mirek

[stanwebber]

capture at your target resolution. the brooktree bt8x8 chip samples the video full-frame before resizing and its algorithmn is quite good. if you're a die hard capture at the highest resolution you can then resize

[mirh]

What does bring me the best quality? I can't influence on how the hardware resizing works although I can change method of resizing in VirtualDub. Assuming that I choose the best option (precise bicubic) what gives me the best?

[Anonymous65]

Can someone confirm that the BT8x8 chip always sample at full (whatever that might be) and then resize to the size spesified in the capture program. I believe it captures at the specified resolution only, and does not do any resizing.

[Torontonian]

I'm messing around with the same problem - I wanna transfer from my 8mm camcorder into SVCD (480x480 NTSC).
Actually there are two ways:
1) capture at 480x480 directly or
2) capture at 480x240 and then resize.

both of them have problems. If you capture full frame (both fields) you're gonna have annoying effect in your *avi file - interlacing. To reduce it you have to use any de-interlacing filter (in VDub, for example).
If you capture only half-frame (one field) and then resize it up to 480 lines (576 for PAL) you will lose quality as well.

But in my opinion it's better to capture at full resolution & deinterlace afterwards -- looks like quality is better than at the half frame.

But it's on monitor - I don't know how it looks on TV screen since I haven't burnt a SVCD yet (still in progress of capturing solutions

[mirh]

I’ve read an article in which it was told that it’s no use capturing in resolution bigger than source material cause it doesn’t improve the quality. What is the resolution of 8mm camcorder? And maybe as I told before it is better to capture at this resolution and than burn X(S)VCD with this resolution and chip in DVD does the job (resizing)?

[Vejita-sama]

Torontonian - MPEG2 supports interlace source material, so if you play to make (x)SVCD you don't have to de-interlace.

[mirh]

"Torontonian MPEG2" What is it ?

[Dave B]

Capturing resolution is always a hot topic on these formus.

Many people argue that you should capture at your desired end resolution as any excess data will be lost in the resize. In some instances, this can be true. However the majority of people on these forums encode to VCD and SVCD which requires the source material to be encoded using the MPEG codecs.

The MPEG codecs always produce a better output when a cleaner, more detailed input is provided. Hence a 352X288 resolution will only provide half the detail that a 352x576 input source will provide.

Calculating the optimum capture resolution however, is more complex than just saying more resolution, more detail. To fully understand capturing you must first understand how a television picture is constructed. In its simplest form, think of a TV picture (PAL in this example) of 576 lines of information running horizontally across the screen. TV pictures do not understand resolutions such as 640x480 and would render such information as 480 lines of TV picture and the 640 vertical resolution would be converted to a single line of data which would be fired onto the TV screen.

As a rule of thumb, always try to capture at the maximum horizontal resolution that the source provides (i.e. 576 PAL or 480 NTSC) Horizontal resolution should really make little difference but as horizontal resizing can produce artifacts, many people capture at a similar horizontal resolution to that of their destination format.

So for PAL VCD you might capture at 352x576 (and then resize to 352x28 and PAL SVCD might be 480x576.

Capturing all 576 lines will however require de-interlacing when producing a VCD but this is a separate issue which has been covered many times in the forum.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Dave B on 2001-11-16 08:07:27 ]</font>

[Torontonian]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-11-16 02:18:41, Vejita-sama wrote:
Torontonian - MPEG2 supports interlace source material, so if you play to make (x)SVCD you don't have to de-interlace.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

It's great if it does! Because I want to watch my archives on both screens - TV & computer monitor and I don't wanna see any of annoying effects.

About camcorder. I own Hi8 one (Hitachi) and in theory it should provide the resolution about 270,000 pixels. Thus, it's about 560x480 -- it perfectly fits to SVCD standard (480x480).

Actually now I'm thinking about other way -- drop SVCD at all and contunue temporarly to burn plain VCDs and simulataneously make video archives at high resolution and high quality using DivX (2-pass mode). And in a copule of years just burn regular DVD (I hope it should be easy and much more cheaper at that time).