First try at VCD from DV Camcorder and I need help.

[Bartenhagen]

I finally bought a firewire card after having a DV camera for some time. I tried to make a vcd today and the process went well but the result was not good. I used Ulead Video Studio 5.0 to capture the video from my camera. I added transitions and a few words but I did not put much effort into this part of it. I saved it as an NTSC movie. I then used DVD Movie Factory to seperate scenes and to burn the VCD. I liked the results as far as the project went but the video is very poor. It is very pixelated especially in action scenes such as my son on his swing. What did I do wrong or is this how it should look. I don't expect DVD quality but I did expect that I would get video that was at least as good as from a VHS tape and this was far from it. I use Ulead DVD Picture Show on a regular basis and have great results. My TV is 46 inches if this makes a difference.

Thanks.

[ima2hd]

I would really try using svcd it is much better especially if you are going to view it on a TV screen. Don't waste your time with vcd. Cheers

[wpeter01]

Dear ima2hd,

please try to burn instead of VCD XVCD. I am also experiencing with AVI files coming from a DV camcorder. I have used a while Video Studio5, now I have upgraded to 6.0. I can recommend to check www.kvcd.net. There you will find a template using 352 x576 resolution and VBR for tmpgenc. I have tried this an the quality is far better than with standard VCD. By the way I am talking about PAL movies, but do not worry there are also NTSC templates available. I have managed to bring a 60min movie to a 800MB CD-R. If you do not care about the number of CD'S you can even increase the resolution and you will get around 40 min DV material in DVD resolution on a 800CDR.
I hope this helps.

Werner

[sheddy]

I capture from my DV camera through a firewire card with Ulead Mediastudio pro and then add transitions etc. I then save the movie in avi format (also capture as avi). I never use Ulead to convert to VCD format though as the results are poor. I always use TMPGenc to encode to vcd or svcd and the results are far superior.

[fatdom]

I think that your main problem is you are encoding from AVI to MPEG with movie factory. I captured DV, added transitions and outputed to a new DV AVI file with premiere. I had the canopus DVcodec installed. I then encoded to VCD with TMPEgnc. I have encoded to both VCD and SVCD and then used Ulead DVD workshop to author and burn the project. The results were excellent (i.e. no blockiness or pixellation), easliy as good (if not better) than VHS with VCD and far superior with SVCD. Try encoding your edited DV AVI file with TMPEgnc (there are many excellent guides available here) before authoring with moviefactory. I use CQ mode with TMPEgnc (quality 100) and motion set on slowest, the reults are excellent if a little large. I use 99min CD-Rs to burn with and so the large file sizes are not too important. Good luck, Dom.

[Bartenhagen]

Thanks for the replies. I tried Dom's suggestions with TMPEgnc and had better results but not as good as I would like. Maybe I am expecting to much. Should I expect that the quality of a SVCD will be as good as if I had the camera hooked up to directly to the TV? I still get some pixelation but maybe this is how an SVCD is. What causes the pixelations? Also what is the format for DV (.avi?)? What I want to know is how I copy what is on my tape rather than capture if that makes sence (maybe this is the same thing). My thinking is that I want to transfer video from the camera bit for bit (rather than doing some sort of conversion as it transfers), edit it and then encode and burn.