Which Codec is the best?

[agerdin]

I am trying to get the best possible quality from a home movie created in Premiere 6.0. It is 13 minutes long and unfortunately I do not have enough drive space to save it uncompressed in AVI (4 Gig left :(). My goal is to get it over to MPG through TEMPGEnc so I can create VCDs. But I aslo want to burn CDRs so I can distribute the movie to be watched in MediaPlayer.

The question is now what codecs to use? Through my own testing I have discovered that the best quality is achieved by code the movie in AVI using the MPEG4v2 codec (available in Premiere) and then convert it to MPEG1 using TEMPGEnc so it can be burned into a VCD. The problem is that I think that you loose quality each time you recode it?

Trying to keep this post short but I have soooo many questions... Lets start with this and see if there are anyone understanding my problem :)

PS. Is there a way to get TEMPGEnc to read AVI DV format? The program says that the format is not supported.

Many Thanks,
\\Anders

[agzz]

if i understand you right, this will help.

http://www.vcdhelp.com/premiereavisynth.htm

[mzidanic]

I used to use MPEG4/V2, but found that it was very blocky in dark areas. So I switched to PicVideo codec (go to www.jpg.com to get a free trial version) - you can't beat it for $20. At a quality setting of 16, I converted a 55 min clip to a file size of about 2GB.

[sean madison]

screw the money, i get it for ya for free if ya IM me on aim- shizzzon

[pinoy2201]

your amazeing sean..you want to be a moderator but you are offering illegal programs and your breaking soo many rules...what makes you think you can be a mod if yuo are offering such things

[sean madison]

by vcdhelps rules, im not breaking any.

I give no links to anything affilated with warez on this site.

I respect this site and in doing so, i obey by the rules.

[pinoy2201]

but you are provideing people the place where they can get such things and that is from you and should not be discussed on a public forum

[agerdin]

Thanks for your help agzz. Avisynth was exactly what I was looking for. However it took me some time before it worked as I finally ended up with VideoServerPackage v.093 plugin and Avisynth v.105 which works slightly diffrent from the help page you provied.

In any case I still have problems getting the sound into TMPGEnc as the file created by Avisynth server is not accepted as audiosource. I might be doing something seriously wrong, but as a newbie I am hoping for help in this forum.

I also tried the Picvideo codecs (trial version :) and did not find it much better than Mpeg4 V2. With the settings set to 16 a 13 minutes long film ended up being 2,5 GB. Might be doing something wrong there too.

\\Anders

[mzidanic]

A 13 min clip taking up 2.5GB??? What's your vid res? If you're going to vcd then no need to have your temp AVI higher than your final 352x240. Since I capture at 320x240, I keep that res in my AVI and convert to 352x240 with tmpgenc. Also, get VirtualDub - I'm sure there's lots of other programs that will tell you, too, but I use it to quickly open up an vid file and find out the file properties (codec, video res, bit rate etc).