Need help making VCDs more efficiently

[JohnDrabek]

I have successfully made VCDs that will play in my Samsung 421P DVD player. I started with an analog camcorder, used Dazzle DVC80 and Videowave 4 to capture the video, used Videowave 4 or Pinnacle Studio 7 to edit, and used TMPGENC and Nero 5.5 to create and burn the VCD.

Where can I find information about the best options and settings for the hardware and software that I have? This site's guides and posts have been very helpful getting started. I want to get the maximum quality of video that is possible given my camcorder, but I don't want to make unnecessary steps or create files that are larger than they need to be.

[lusid]

The basic idea is you want to maintain as much quality as you can right up to the tmpgenc step. That means capturing at the highest resolution your hardware supports, and use as low loss a codec as you can along the way. Then you want to filter out as much extraneous noise as you can without sacrificing detail at or just before the mpeg conversion step.

With your setup, you are throwing away 75% of the picture information in step 1, since the capture device you are using only goes up to 352x288.

I don't know what avi codec you are using at capture, but try to use either huffy or mjpeg at Q18 or above. Also, you want to make sure your video isn't being re-compressed as part of the editing process, since that will impose more loss at that stage. I haven't used videowave in years, so I'm not sure if it does or not.

Since you are using camcorder footage, you probably don't need to worry about noise reduction if it's recordings are clean.

There are some options in tmpgenc that may or may not help. The Soften Block Noise setting may help if you get macroblocks, but I try to leave it off as it throws out too much detail. Camcorder footage is more prone to blockiness because the image often isn't steady. If you have that problem you may want to try using soften block noise, and experiment with the intra and non-intra settings.