Home video quality issue

[sea4me]

Hi,

Have tried a few times to produce an SVDC with good quality.
None of my attempts so far can be descibed as very successful.

Problem is that the s-vcd is sort of blocky specially when there is a lot of movement.

There doesnt seem to be any interlacing problems and everything else looks normal. I remember having read somewhere that home tapes are difficult to get good quality because its hard to keep the camera still when capturing.

The original source is an analogue tape. Converted with TMPGEnc with max constant bitrate and at best(slowest) conversion.

So the questions are as follows :
Is this caused by insufficient datarate when converting from avi to mpeg?
If so, will the result be better if i make an ordinary vcd?
Is there a way around it?
I have a pioneer DVD 343 player which may be able to cope with higher bitrates. Is it adviceable to try it?

Please help

[Bobbyloo]

If your computer is fast enough and your DVD player can play XSVCDs,
(you can fit up to 30 minutes of excellent quality video on 700 mb cd. extremely close to your original tape)

Do the followings:

1- Capture from your video camera at 704x480 (Uncompressed). You'll need lots of Hard-drive space. (about 27 gig per 15 minutes of video)

2- Do all your editings (Ulead Videostudio is very easy to use and gives a you very good quality rendered AVI)

3- Use TMPGEnc software (SVCD Wizard) with following settings:
(Unlock the settings by right clicking on labels)

a- Stream video set at 704x480
b- Video arrange method: Fullscreen keep aspect ratio
c- VBR 2 pass ( Max: 4000, Average: 2520, Min: 600 )
d- vbr buffer set to 0 (automatic)
e- audi set at 44100, 192 kb/sec
f- At the end of the wizard select 80 minute setting and set the percentage to 100%.

remember: your end result depends on the quality of your capture and the ultimate capture from an analogue camera is:
704x480 and UNCOMPRESSED.

Good luck

[rawi82]

It´s absolutly NOT necessary to capture uncompressed from analogue sources! Uncompressed avis create huge files with no real quality gain and you need a fast hard drive and processor.
Capture with free Huffyuv codec if you want lossless compression. It reduces file size by 2-4 at least. It works just like a zip program for avis.

Personnally i use PicVideo Codec, a M-JPEG codec which performs very well on my 900 Duron. Of course it doesn´t have lossless compression but with quality setting 18-19 i´m very satisfied. It takes only 8-9 GB/hour (704x576 PAL) and i have not seen any big difference between huffyuv/uncompressed and MJPEG after compression to MPEG-1/MPEG-2.

But it depends all on the source quality: garbage in/garbage out!
TMPGEnc noise filter can produce a visible improvent in quality but it increases encoding time by 2-6 on my machine, depending on the filter strength.

I hope i could help you, too!

[k5oz]

sea4me,

I have used CVD with great success, hard to tell original from CVD. The 352 x 480 gives more bitrate per pixel than 480 x 480 Std SVCD. The DVD set top player will present this to the TV in the normal 4:3 ratio.

Read; http://www.vcdhelp.com/svcd

Dave

[igornt]

Whatever you do, VCDs and SVCDs remain crap in comparison with DVDs. If you want to have your home video being of superb quality, switch to DVDs. It is not a problem now, as prices on drives and media dropped significantly.

[SatStorm]

Your source is really difficult.
The best solution IMO is: 1/2 D1 capture and encode. That means 352 X 576/480. You need an average bitrate between 3000kb/s to 3500kb/s (for really extreme source!). That way, you have excellent (if not perfect) results
You can burn those mpeg 2 files as xCVD (about 30 min per 80min CD-R) or DVD-R.
Since you leave to US and HDTV there is a reality, better turn DVD-R from the start!

[sea4me]

Thx all u resourceful people out there.

I will look into the various solutions and do some testing.

In the manwhile;

Thx again

[MpegEncoder]

Analog tapes will always produce marginal quality digital disks of any kind. You didn't mention how you captured this before you converted using TmpgEnc. It's possible that your problem starts there.

For all of you who think that you are going to get "DVD quality" from analog tapes, I've got some ocean -front property in Arizona that I think you might be interested in.

[SatStorm]

Yes, and Bugs Bunny once sell the brooklyn bridge to my grandfather! Do you want to exchange properties?

[sea4me]

Besides the jokes there where actually also a ?

My avi file is captured using Virtual dub and huffyuv compression.

Based on the look of the avi there doesnt seem to be a great deal of quality loss in this process. Looks terrible on screen though due to the interlacing artifacts. These, however disappears when converting with TMPGEnc to svcd format.

[kyemeng]

I tried capturing to uncompressed avi, using Huffy and PicVideo. The quality of the movies after conversion by Tmpgenc shows that there is a substantial difference in quality between the 3 methods outline above. The uncompressed avi provided the best quality with Huffy codec coming in a close second and PicVideo a distant third.
The only thing stopping me from using uncompressed avi as a capture format is the file size.

[sea4me]

The main problem still remains converting from avi (compressed or not)
to mpeg-2.

This is where the huge drop in quality is generated.

[q1aqza]

When you say blocky with movement, are you referring to the picture quality itself or blocky/jerky movement when the camera is panning.

The only reason for asking is that my DVD player is the same as yours and I have always found that camera panning and high movement shots result in blocky movement. I suppose a better description is non-fluid motion and it seems as though it is skipping bits even though I know it isn't and I know it was not a field order problem.

Those same SVCDs play perfect with fluid motion in my mum's Cyberhome player. Therefore I have always assumed it is just the way my Pioneer handles SVCD playback.

[House de Kris]

I tend to agree with q1aqza, it may be an issue with the player. You mentioned you use max bitrate. On my Pioneer DV-440, it goes all wacky with bitrates above 2100kbps.