What format for best quality

[henrik25]

Hi all.
I have bought me a digital videocamera. I got married last week, and we got around 45 min video of it. When its on the computer, in AVI format, its around 8 Gb, so ofcourse i need to compress it. Im not sure what to do to get the best result.
I have made a lot of svcd's in my time, so i know how to do that. The only thing im sad about is that I will go down in resolution. When I do that i must loose some quality. I dont have a dvd recorder, but can i make a dvd (MPEG2 ?) and just play it back from the computer (it is connected to my tv) ?
I also thought of making a divx, but i have heard that the quality is not the best. So to sum it up. What should i do to make the best result, and loose as little quality as possible, and still being able to keep my 45 movie on 1-2 cd's.

Regards Henrik

[racer-x]

You can make an Mpeg-2 with around 4200 kbp bitrate at 720x480. That should fit on 2 CDs. Anybody should be able to play them on a computer that has DVD codec installed. If you have PowerDvd or other dvd player, you're all set. Whatever you do, don't erase the source video on the MiniDV tape! Eventually you may get a DVD burner and may want to make a reel DVD out of it.

Hope that helps

[MrKGB]

Forget about CDs, just encode it as DVD @ 8000 mbps, use PowerDVD or even WindowsMediaPlayer for now.
By the end of this year DVD recorders will become really cheap, so buy it then.

[DJRumpy]

If you later plan to burn it to DVD, then you should create a DVD comliant MPEG. If you do not plan to get a burner soon, then you should convert it to DivX, or XviD. You heard incorrectly. They can both exceed the quality of MPEG-2.

[FulciLives]

Hello

Well it all depends on HOW you want to view it and where and if it is just for you or other people.

If you want to view it on a stand alone DVD player then you are stuck with using either SVCD or VCD (as you don't have a DVD burner). SVCD will give you the best quality of the two but very few stand alone players can properly play a SVCD. If you know that your player will then I would do that ... therefore you don't need the computer for playback. However, if you intend to make copies for others then VCD is MUCH more compatable but of course the quality is not that great. At 45 minutes though it should fit on one CD either way and CD-R discs are cheap so you could make both a SVCD and a VCD and give both to family and friends with instructions to try the SVCD first but should it not work then try the VCD.

If you don't mind playing it back from the computer then you should probably just leave it as a DV file. If you don't have room to keep an 8GB file on your computer you can compress it down to a DVD compliant mpeg2 file but at full quality that will still be a large file (probably around 2GB I am guessing). However if you ever do get a burner at least you would have a file ready to burn. If you want to keep the quality but minimize the size and you don't mind needing to use a computer for playback then use DivX. Turning it into a DivX will give you the same quality as turning it into a DVD complaint mpeg2 file except the file size will be small enough to fit on one CD-R disc instead of being approximately a 2GB file that won't fit on a single CD-R disc. The DivX format is great ... the only downside is you must play it back using a computer. It is also easy to share since the file size is so small but unlike a SVCD or VCD you again must play it back on a computer.

In any event make sure you keep the original DV file, even if you copy it back out to your camcorder (on tape) because then at some point in the future you can make a DVD out of it.

In fact, there are some places (some film developing places do this) that will make a DVD for you from your digital tape copy. The price can be a lot (around $50 or so I think) but at least it will be DVD quality and if you ever get a burner (or know someone that has one) you or they can easily make additional copies from that original DVD.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Luis Neves]

Regarding quality and Divx, I am confused about what are we talking about. I usually made my analog captures with Huffyuv, and got and avi with around 200 Mb per minute. One of these days I found that I have "microsoft mpg4" on my computer and made a try; the quality of the capture was very good, and data rate only around 23 Mb per minute (did not play with standard settings). So, this "microsoft mpg4" is divx or are we talking about different things? If so, what is the best in quality?

p.s. - my pentium IV 2.0 ghz can capture at 40-60% with mpg4 (size 480x288), which is only a little more busy than using huffyuv (30-50%). What happens with divx? More demanding?

[spidey]

You do not want to compress on your capture if you wish to S/VCD it in the future. The reason for using Huffyuv is to get an uncompressed quality source for your s/vcd.

If you're just playing on the pc and not keeping for future use, then compressing it would be fine. DivX capping should be a similar load demand on the pc - however do not cap compressed if your looking to use THIS file at a later date for your s/vcd source clip.

[DJRumpy]

The Huffman codec isn't uncompressed. It's a lossless codec, meaning you lose no quality when encoding using this codec. It has a compression ratio of about 2:1. The MPEG-4 compression scheme is shared by both Windows WMV, DivX, XviD, and any other MPEG-4 codec. They basics compression for these is the same, although they differ beyond that.

It is strange that your CPU load wasn't much higher for the MPEG-4 capture. What framesize (resolution) were you capturing at? You can normally expect closer to 60-70% for cpu loads, due to the CPU overhead while it's cranking on the MPEG-4 compression. Huffman generates overhead slightly due to the small amount of compression, and more so because of the disk intensive writes (it has to write a lot of data very quickly to disk during capture). If you want to see the difference, capture to Uncompressed, Huffman, and then to XviD. The volume of disk data being written on the uncompressed capture can be huge, which increases the CPU load. Huffman will generally get better than uncompressed. MPEG-4 captures generally are the most CPU intensive.

[energy80s]

The first thing to do is to output the DV file back to the camcorder and save this master tape. That will allow you to convert to whatever format is in vogue in the future. For now, either go with DVD, CVD or VCD, don't use SVCD as it isn't that compatable. As it's only 45 minutes, I would run off 2 files, one at VCD and one at CVD and burn them onto CDR's for general playback (giving you both MPEG1 and MPEG2 compatibility), knowing that you still have the master DV file for future conversions.

[Luis Neves]

DJRumpy, I got the mpg-4 explanation. Maybe the load on my CPU is not too much heavy because I capture at 480x288. I usually convert to svcd format (resize to 488x576, Pal system), then burn to DVD using the header trick. The quality of the capture with microsoft mpg-4 seems so good on the screen (the image is just a litle soft, but colors and overall picture are great) that the final result should be close to the one using Huffyuv. The big advantage is that I can store around 60 hours of film in my 80 Gb hard disk capturing with mpg-4 and only a little more than 6 hours with huffyuv. And I have not changed any paremeters, I noticed that the bitrate of capture can be changed (standard is 3000, if I remember well).

[DJRumpy]

If you really want to retain the quality as much as possible, consider using Multi-Pass VBR and XviD. You can place over an hour of video into an AVI file that fits on a CD-R. The Bitrate should be somewhere between 700kb/s, and 6000 (1500 would look excellent with mpeg-4). The extra passes will help with scene fades, and scene changes. These tend to exhibit macroblocks, unless the bitrate is high enough. Of course, you file is so short (you did say 45 minutes right), that you could crank the bitrate way up, and still have a very small file. The compression in MPEG-4 is so good, the loss in quality is barely noticable if the bitrate is high enough. Even for a single pass encode.