What format to use for 8mm?

[LSchafroth]

I have a LOT of home movies on my older 8mm camera. It take VERY good pictures and the sound is mono only.

I have WinXP and Pinnicle PCTV (newest model). I will be using iuVCR for the capture as I only have WDM drivers.

I will use VirtualDub and TMPGenc.

My questions: What format is best for this type of video source?

VCD, SVCD, XVCD? Bitrates? Sound rate/compression? I will be using 80m CD-R's. Filters? Write speed? 2x/1x/4x?

My Panasonic PV56 DVD player will only play VCD's or SVCD's with the header trick. My kids Apex 1600 may or may not play VCD's. Your camptaibility list shows that some do some done't. Their still wrapped under the tree so I cannot try it.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Lannie

[hardwork12]

I am still trying to figure out how to get good enough quality for my liking for the same exact project. I even purchase a DVD player that can run SVCD, CVD and VCD.

I still do not have what I concider acceptable quality so don't know what to recommend but I did learn a few things:

The best I got so far was to capture at 704x480 (in USA) and used the CVD output format with the setting of CBR 2520 (used virtualdub for capture and TMPGEnc for encode). Since SVCD works for you I did not find a quality diffderence for SVCD vs CVD so stay with SVCD for your testing. My testing has been limited to CVD which is 352x480 rather than the 480x480 for SCVD but I think what I have learned will apply to SVCD. Forget VCD the bitrate is just TOO low. You will need the highest bitrate that will work this is certainly one key to sucess.


To improve the quality I used some filters. In TMPGEnc I applied some gamma correction using the filter "simple color correction" that had the most effect. I tried some "sharpen edges" filtering but this seemed to have minimal effect. This may be different for your capture system but it did improve my output some. Just have to try it on your system.

With the above viewed on a small TV say 27" or less it may be acceptable to you. For my large screen its just not good enough yet and even on my 27' TV there are quality issues but may be livable.

8mm is just very hard to deal with I have learned. To convince myself of this I captured using my DVD player as the source and I could capture and encode the CVD and the quality of the cature was almost as good as the DVD rip version of the same content. This test also showed me that a higher than needed capture resolution (704x480 improved the quality of my encoded resul significantly over capture at 352x480).

I never burn higher than 16X this gives me playback problems on some of my media.