Very confused: need Help!

[spongebob]

Hello,

This issue may have been discussed before, but I could not find links to it, so I appologize if it is annoying.
I recently pruchased SONY TRV-140 camcorder. It has firewire and USB ports. Hoping to be able to have my home-videos on CDs instead of tapes I have also purchased a NEC IEEE-1394 card. The camcorder came with Sony's Pixella. I did not like it much, instead I'm using Ulead Video Studio 5.0 DV. I can capture the movies without problems and make an AVI file in DV format. here comes the confusion. I am trying to make
XSVCDs ( my APEX-ad1500 is capable of playing them). I have tried few recommendations given on vcdhelp.com but the best movie I made looked little better than moving colored bathroom tiles. Movie maker that comes with XP also made an AVI file but TMPGEnc can't convert it into Mpeg.
I have tried creating Mpeg-1 file with Ulead Video Studio and then burning it on a CD but that did not seem to work.

Could you please help?

Thanks.

SpongeBob

[Craig Tucker]

Try making a standard SVCD first and see if that looks ok. If so, you then have a point from which to work from to gain any improvements in picture quality. You say you made an XSVCD, but you hav'nt mentioned the bitrate or resolution you used.

Craig

[spongebob]

Craig,

Thank you for the reply. I will have to check my files for the bitrate and so on, and then I will post them. May be I am beeing to ambitious in pursuing the best quality, but let me lay out few details. My camcorder puts out 500 horizontal lines. I'm not sure what resolution in pixels that corresponds to? Does it make sence to try Mpeg-2 with 720-480 resolution and 4000kbps?
Also how to gain improvements in picture quality? what are the parameters that need to be varied?

best,
spongebob

[Craig Tucker]

If you are transferring DV quality video to your hard drive via firewire, then encoding this to SVCD is fine. The resolution of DV is 720x576 (pal) so youve got plenty of information there to start with. If you are planning on playing your S(X)VCD on a stand alone player see if there is an upper bitrate limit for your player. No point encoding to a very high bitrate if your player cant handle it. (look at the DVD compatability list for this info)

Craig

[spongebob]

Hey Craig,

Tried, as you said, using built in templates in TMPGEng and it worked fine. So far I have tried Mpeg-2, 480x480 with 2520 kbit/s. When I tried 720x480 the quality has degraded though. Does it make sence to go to Mpeg-2 or better stick with mpeg-1?

Thanks,
spongebob