Not as good as I thought?

[skiz]

Hi Guys,

I've just made my first VCD and put it into my DVD player to watch, the picture wasn't that good. Seemed blocky and a bit fuzzy. Does anyone know how I can improve the image?

I used iMovie and Toast to create it but was given very little options i.e. could'nt choose MPEG2 and it would'nt let me choose best quality, it kept defaulting to medium quality for some reason? Appreciate any help. Thanks.

[Thargok]

Probably the video you put in was low quality.

[skiz]

Thanks for your reply,
The video was good. Its just that imovie and toast wont let me make SVCD to improve output (unless I'm doing something wrong?) Do you know if there are any plugins or extentions I can get to enable this?

I know I probably need to go out spend the money to buy something like Cleaner but I'm try to get away with what I've got. Any ideas? Thanks

[Ross]

There are many references to SVCD authoring and burning on this and other forums. But in a nutshell you need a compliant mpeg2 stream.
Video: max 2600 kbit/sec MPEG-2 @ 480 x 480 pixels (PAL 480 x 576) & 29,97 fps (PAL 25 fps)
Audio: 32 - 384 kbit/sec MPEG-1 layer2 or MPEG-2

Export an iMovie to QT best.
Import .mov into TMPGenc (free) running on VirtualPC.
Select SVCD and set up to match above settings.
Image the .mpg file into an .iso with vcdToolsX (free).
Burn with toast as cd-rom xa.

Results will be a DVD quality CD with about 30 min playtime. There are other ways to scale, bitrate,and encode mpeg2 (m.pack free if you can find it), but no good way around muxing with TMPGEnc.

[vhelp]

skiz,

In short, and simple. . .

You CAN'T make something that is already block better.

I'm with thorgak, your video is blocky, but not as blocky when played
via its origonal (avi? or mpeg?)...and then you are re-encoding it again? You're
gonna end up with more blocks, if anthing worse. Wake and smell
the coffee! GIGO!!

Anytime you re-encoding something, especially from and already
encoded mpeg, you will loose some of its quality, period!

You will NEVER get the same quality as the orgigonal, but very close.
But, if you source (mpeg) is already bad quality anyways (but you can't see
it too well, cause it's boarderline) you will see the bad quality, once you
try and re-encode it. You'll see it! Nothing you can do to make it better!
Period!

Sure you can use filters to soften it up abit, but you are not making it
better! You're fooling youself here.

My advice is this, if you're downloading these clips,
first, my hats off to ya for your fast connection, and two, find some better
quality AVI or MPEG to rencode them to svcd.
If these (mpegs?) are encoded to something less then 2500, well, you're
pretty much gambling on your final output. Sorry! But, wake up and smell
the coffee!, he, he... But, its ok for kid yourself, (just not me, he, he... )
You gotta understand... when people posts MPEG clips, they are already
jimmying them to:
1 - fit or make them D/L'able for people
2 - encoding them low enough (just low enough) not to show much blocks
if they can help it.
When you re-encode these clips, your encoder will find these flows and
consiquently show them.

...find better clips to work with. ...and, smell the coffee before you D/L these
clips! He, he..................................

my spelling is bad. I know.

Later.