SVCD authoring problem - need help

[NickWong]

Need some help here or maybe you can route me to the right area. I spent all of yesterday looking thru this website for authoring tips but none seem to describe the problem I am facing.

The Problem: I transferred a video from my DV camcorder to my PC to write to VCD and SVCD. I managed to finish the production & followed the Pinnacle software help step by step. The finished video quality was terrible.

How poor... well I got choppy playback, audio spikes pops & clicks all over, frames freezing momentarily for 3-4 seconds here and there, horrible artifacts around edges of images that move fast (esp. the line by line resolution of the video which becomes visible when objects move), & generally grainy picture (in fact, the VCD and SVCD copies were almost identically bad). Geez, the movies on my old VHS tapes look far, far better than this stuff!! Here's what I used:

Camcorder: JVC DVX-707, bought a month ago.

Capturing method: Firewire to my Compaq notebook, a PIII 450Mhz running WinME, 128MB RAM, 30GB HDD

Capturing & Authoring software: Pinnacle Studio 7 (and later tried TMPGEnc, same results)

Video standard: PAL

CD-RW: Samsung 32X CD-RW drive/Nero burner

I spent the last 6 days trying all kinds of different config, converting avi to mpeg 1 & 2, coverting mpeg 1 to 2, trying out different authoring software, etc. Wasted 10 perfectly good disks. Got the same disgusting results each time.

I almost forgot: after converting the DV's avi to mpeg (SVCD setting) and playing it off my hard disk, the video is still okay altho I can already see some (acceptable) video degradation. but after writing it to CD using Nero, it is, to put it simply, unusable.

My questions: Did the bit errors creep in during the capturing, conversion or writing stage? Is it because my PIII 450Mhz processor is too slow? Not enough memory? Did I capture the AVI incorrectly? (It looked perfect when I played back the camcorder and the captured avi version). Did I do the mpeg conversion wrongly? Or have I got this whole process wrong?

I am a newbie at this, pls advise if there's an FAQ I missed out in this website that deals with these specific probs. at the very least I'd like to understand why the converted mpeg file is a disaster. Thanks.

Nick

[uni]

Try to slow your burner down to 16x and see what you get. I've found that to be a problem: i.e., burning the image file too fast results in all kinds of issues.

-UNI

[Corremn]

Your ploblem sounds identical to my own (and a few others on this site) , the converted mpegs were great but when burnt to VCD Urrrgghh!!! I tried basically everything (no point listing them)

You answer to the problem is you burner sucks. For some reasons no matter what you try some burners just cant create VCD no matter what speed. ( I hope someone can tell me why)

The only way I could solve this problem was to create the CD image on my computer, copy in to CD (as a data file) take it to another burner and use that. I hope you have access to another burner.

And btw use CD-WR so you wont waste your disks