Newbie question

[VideoPhreak]

I am new but have many years non linear edit and capture experience using Media100 on Mac based systems.

I can export movies from my system as self contained QuickTime files and have been encoding with Media Cleaner 5 for web delivery with fantastic results. My question now that I have caught the VCD bug is what should I do to get started here, assume I know nothing about creating a VCD, however I can use Cleaner 5 to encode my video files as MPEG-1 but dont know what to do from there, is it a better option to export my edited files as self contained QuickTime movies and then convert them on the PC using the software you folks talk about here? (TMPGEnc) or what? I recently downloaded an MPEG file of good quality and trried to use NERO to create the VCD and it seemed to do it ok with the default settings but the VCD would not play in any stand alone DVD player I tried it in, they all said 'please insert disc" after I loaded the "VCD" so it appears that I missed something......anyone willing to take a shot at this with me?

Thanks alot!

[vitualis]

I cannot really comment on VCD creation on the Macintosh but I have the feeling that the software available is much more mature on the PC. For info on VCD creation on the Mac, I suggest you have a look at the Mac forum...

As for on the PC, TMPGEnc is a very good MPEG-1 encoder at VCD bitrates, not to mention free. It's only rival for VCD standard MPEG-1 is the Panasonic MPEG encoder, which is commercial. For someone like you who does a lot of non-linear editing work, it may be worthwhile getting the Adobe Premiere plug-in version of the Panasonic MPEG Encoder as it allows you to directly export to MPEG-1.

In terms of the method you described, it would appear that you've done all the right things. However, you should probably be aware that although most DVD players are "VCD compatible", many are not "CD-R/CD-RW" compatible. Naturally, those DVD players not designed to read CD-R/W media does so poorly or not at all.

DVD players that are designed to read CD-R/W media will have this fact advertised and will definitely have this feature in the users manual. These players read CD-R/W very well, which is to be expected.

For those players that are not designed for CD-R/W media, you can still often find a brand of CD-R media that will work. However, you will have to experiment. CD-RW often works better in these cases.

Regards.

[VideoPhreak]

Thanks for the quick reply, you may be correct, the DVD player I tried this VCD on was a Sony, and after reading some more posts I gather the Sony is not a popular one here. I am open to suggestions as to which DVD player to buy?

Next question is all of my video is (NTSC 640x480) unless I am capturing DV, DV-CAM etc then it would be at 720x486. If I export the video it will also be at this resolution, however when using cleaner 5 I have the option of cropping the file to various sizes (320x240 etc) what is the prefered image size for DVD/VCD playback to get the best image quality? I would think it would still be 640x480 here in the U.S. since that is our brodcast standard? yes / no ? Thanks again!

[vitualis]

NTSC VCDs have a framesize of 352x240.
NTSC SVCDs have a framesize of 480x480.
NTSC DVDs have a framesize of 720x480.

None of the above have a pixel aspect ratio of 1 and you should probably need to be aware of this.

VCD, SVCD has a display aspect ratio (DAR) of 4:3.
DVDs can have a DAR of 4:3 or 16:9 (?more).

Regards.