Any point capping at 640x480 if you're going to encode VCD?

[fmctm1sw]

Is there?

[mrtristan]

The quality of your end product is directly dependent on the quality of your capture.

Yes.

480X480 usually works out fine, for me.

[fmctm1sw]

The quality of your end product is directly dependent on the quality of your capture.

Yes.

480X480 usually works out fine, for me.

480x480? I'm new to this and when I saw that, it looked like a square. I said, "there's no way that will look right on my TV." Will it?

[greengiant]

IT WILL WORK OUT FINE

[sterno]

480x480? I'm new to this and when I saw that, it looked like a square. I said, "there's no way that will look right on my TV." Will it?

480x480 is the standard SVCD resolution, the DVD (SVCD) player adjusts it to the TV's aspect ratio. If you capture at 480x480 it'll look stretched on your computer, but burn it to SVCD and it'll look right when it's played. It'll also look right encoded to VCD or some other standard because the encoder will resize it properly as long as you tell it what aspect ratio to assume for the input (4:3 for standard TV).

[Akai Rounin]

If you know your final product will be SVCD, then capture at 480x480 and you will be fine. However, you mentioned you will encode to VCD, so 352x480 would work a little better for you, (presuming NTSC, of course). Do some tests, as your DVD player may accept 352x480 XVCD resolution for playback. If not, having a 352x480 initial capture will allow you to get both fields of an interlaced video signal at once. Remember, the number of vertical lines (240 vs 480) is much more important than the number of horizontal pixels (640 vs 352), if you must choose between the two for the sake of bandwidth. Naturally, if you have a ton of hard drive space, and your computer can handle it, go ahead and capture at 640x480. With any of these input resolutions, your final VCD resolution of 352x240 will look quite good with the proper video bit rate.

HUN-YA!

Akai Rounin

[Anonymous65]

Normally, the higher the capture resolution, the better the converted video looks. If the video is VHS, then 352x480 is fine. If it's higher quality video, then go all the way up to 720x480 if you can.

[pixel8or]

I was going to start a new thread but I think what I have will fit here.

I did a test of my own and was wondering if this is valid for comparing quality of capture. I captured the same ~10 sec. of a store bought VHS tape using huffyuv and VirtualVCR. Here's what I did...

Captured at:
-352x240
-352x480
-640x480

Then I filtered each capture in VirtualDub to get rid of some noise. This was just filtering for noise, no resize, no deinterlace.

Next I ran each capture through TMPGEnc with the VCD template. I just used the wizard for NTSC VCD and didn't change anything.

Finally, I opend each of the mpegs in Vegas Video, using a 640x480 project setting and I captured the same frame from each of the different mpegs at 640x480 to see what they looked like.

My results are here.

Keep in mind that these are enlargements from the 352x240 mpegs.

I'm only looking at these on my computer. I don't yet have a standalone DVD player... hopefully that will be remedied by the end of this month.

I really can't see any noticable difference. I've heard that 640x480 gives better quality, but I don't see how it does when you're ending up with 352x240. I can understand using 480 height to get both fields, but why more width?