Best capture resolution for VCD

[ntonix]

Hi, what resolution should I capture from Sony Video8 Handycam (PAL) to produce best result in VCDs? Will capturing videos with higher resolution than 352x288 produce better result than capturing at exactly 352x288 ? Or perhaps just using some filters,egharpen,smooth in VDub ? Thanks.

[Dave B]

For VCD production you should capture in the full vertical and target horizontal resolution - (352x576). The main reasoning behind this is:

1. Capturing at a vertical resolution of 576 will capture both fields of the video. If you capture at 288 you are effectively throwing half the detail away. Deinterlacing and resizing a 576 capture to 288 will yield better quality than just capturing direct at 288.

2. Capturing at 352x576 will avoid introducing artifacts by resizing the video horizontally during conversion.

3. A decent 352x576 capture contains twice the information that a 352x576 capture provides. The higher the source quality, the higher the destination quality.

Resolution aside, you must also ensure that you are capturing to a high quality codec. Most people on this site capture to either HUFFYUV or MJPEG with a quality setting >18.

[Betamax]

For VCD production you should capture in the full vertical and target horizontal resolution - (352x576).

I strongly disagree with this :
You'll get best results when you're capturing in FULL size of the video, this is either 704x576 for PAL (704x480 for NTSC) or much better would be the FULL size of DVD, which is 720x576 for PAL (or 720x480 for NTSC).
It would help a lot if you even capture in Interlaced mode and even more if you could capture using a DV-codec.
Encoding in TMPGenc will give you a (S)VCD of very high quaility (and NO artifacts !).[/b]

[Dave B]

If you are creating a VCD then there is no reason to capture at a horizontal resolution of either 704 or 720.

Video caputured at 704x576 would require horizontal resizing to fit into VCD specs. This horizontal resizing process is unnecessary due to the way an analog video signal is constructed. If anything, the resize process is likely to produce artifacts in the resultant video which would not compress well to MPEG.

Video captured at 704x576 will also take up about twice as much hard drive space as that captured at 352x576.