Starting all over

[marceggers]

Two months ago I began trying to put my digital camcorder tapes on VCD. After several weeks I decided to backoff for a while because I was becoming so frustrated. While cooling my heels I have tried to monitor these forums and learn all that I can. It appears that what I want to do is possible or impossible depending upon whose forum comment you believe. So I'm ready to try again. If what I want to do isn't feasible then I will purchase whatever soft/hardware is needed to get the job done and lick my wounds later. As stated I want to put my digital videos on some permanent medium...either VCD, CD, or DVD (I'll need to buy a DVD burner, however.) My camcorder is a Canon ZR20. My system is a Pentium 4, 2.0gig processor, 512 RDRAM, 40 gig harddrive. I use Sonic Foundry Video Factory 2 as my software. My connection is IEEEE1394 Firewire. I am able to play my video directly from my camcorder onto my 27" TV and the quality is great. That's the kind of quality I want when I move the video onto whatever medium will work best for me. When I download the video from my camcorder onto my computer and play it back on the default screen included in VF2 (approx. 4"x6") it still looks okay. But if I enlarge that screen to covet my 15" flatscreen monitor the video becomes very pixelated. If I take that same video and put it onto a VCD and try to play it on my 27" TV it is totally unrecognizable. I am obviously missing something very basic and important. If anyone can help I would be forever indebted. Thanks.

[House de Kris]

My setup is quite similar to you, I use the Canon ZR20 and I use Video Factory. Although, I use Video Factory 1.0 with the Ligos MPEG encoder. First of all, no MPEG compressed file will look as good as the direct output of your camcorder to your TV. Compressing to DVD standards will look purdy darn close. SVCD ain't bad either. Then there is VCD. Even though VCD isn't so nice, I still wouldn't call it unrecognizable, or even totally unrecognizable.

Some things will influence the quality of the final outcome, like if your are shaking the camera violently or panning quickly. Just as a test, you could record some broadcast TV on your ZR20 and use that as a reference for further experiments. BTW, what is the bitrate of your VCD, or are you keeping to the standard?

In general, I don't think VCD is great, but SVCD is quite acceptable. Also, don't worry if the full screen display on your computer monitor looks poor, it usually looks better when displayed on the TV. I use a 36" TV and sit about 10 feet away and can tolerate VCD.

[EricB]

Well, try this as a test:
Transfer some DV video from your camera to the computer. Edit it as DV in VideoFactory and send back out to your tape as DV. When you play this on your TV it should look great. If it doesn't, you have some other problem. For example, maybe you are unintentially converting to some other format along the way.

For all sorts of reasons, the DV will not look as good on your computer as it does on TV. What you need now is a good encoder. I haven't used VideoFactory, but TMPGenc is available free and is one of the best around.

I've gotten pretty nice results with xVCD (higher bitrate than standard DV), and also SVCD. However, I recently started using a DVD-R burner, and it really solves all your problems (in my opinion). Just encode using the standard DVD template, and the result burned on a DVD, looks virtually identical to the source.