VCD to SVCD HELP!

[cncox]

In the past, I have created mpeg1 VCD files. I now want to create SVCD MPEG2 files and have noticed the following:

1) I have created used VideoStudio to create all of my past videos. After editing the videos, I would save these files as NTSC DV (AVI) files. I then use TMPGENc to convert the finished AVI file to VCD compliant MPEG1 files. (Just a little history here)

2) I recently created a video using VideoStudio 6.0 and did the same process using TMPGEnc. I now have the original AVI file (750 MB created through VideoStudio 6.0) and the VCD MPEG1 file (37MB created with TMPGenc 2.5).

3) Now, I decided to convert to an SVCD format. I used TMPGEnc to convert both the MPEG1 VCD file and the AVI raw file on two different discs.

After burning both of these videos to discs, guess which one looks about 10 times better. The original AVI file I converted to SVCD looks MUCH better then the VCD file converted to SVCD.

My question is how can I get the same quality from the VCD file as I did from the original AVI? Is there something I am missing here?

I have about 10-12 videos that I have saved as MPEG-1 files and discarded the original AVI (due to hard disk space). Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[sterno]

The short answer is that you can't. Every time you recompress the video with a lossy codec like MPEG you throw away some data, and once it's gone you can't get it back. Converting VCD to SVCD generally gains you nothing unless you either have a player that supports SVCD and not VCD or want to add something that's SVCD-specific (dual audio tracks or switchable subtitles).

[cncox]

So basically in the future if I want to convert the original, I should convert to MPEG2 DVD and work from there?

Is there any way to uncompress the VCD file as it was before?

[sterno]

Whatever your end result will be (VCD, SVCD, DVD, something else), you should always start from the highest quality source you have. Ideally that's your original uncompressed AVI file and you go directly to your final format.

You can't uncompress a VCD for the reasons I stated before - some of the data is gone. MPEG compression isn't like a Zip file, you can't just squeeze it down and then extract it back to the original. MPEG compression is lossy, when you compress something with MPEG some of the original data is irretrievably lost. You can convert your VCD to an uncompressed AVI, but then you'll just have a really big file with the exact same quality as your VCD.