Xing Vs TMPEGENc

[shin_zer]

I Have the impression that, Xing is faster (VCD Conversion that is) than TMPGEnc, but gives lower quality. Can anyone confirm this?

Anyone has tips of getting the best of VCD format also?
Thx

[adam]

Yes I can confirm it, Xing is faster, or at least was the last time I used it. Personally I find its quality very poor.

For the highest quality VCD use either Panasonic mpeg1 encoder or TMPGenc. If you live in an NTSC country then make sure and encode in ntscfilm (23.976fps) and not NTSC. Of course this only applies if your source originated at film, but if you are ripping DVDs than this is the case. This grants you a huge quality increase.

You may want to use some light noise reduction in the encoder. This prevents macroblocks from appearing in high motion scenes. Other than that, the standard VCD settings for both TMPGenc and Panasonic are good. There's not a whole lot of room for variation in the VCD format.

[shin_zer]

Thx!
Exactly, what Noise Reduction settings do you use, and do you apply a Color Correction?

PS:
Yup! Macroblocks is the problem, specially when i modded a movie into a 4:3 format, using full screen.

[adam]

Well now that I have a dvd burner I don't think I will be making VCDs anymore, so I have no use for noise reduction. But I always used temporal smoother in avisynth for noise reduction because TMPGenc's is just way too slow. For SVCDs I would use (1,1) on action movies, none on regular movies. For VCDs I would use (2,2) on very complex sources, and other times (1,1).

No I don't mess with the color correction, I don't think its necessary with a DVD source.

[perdomot]

Adam,
I'm copying my old vhs movies to vcd so which setting should I use when encoding on TMPEG, NTSC or NTSCfilm? Quality is my focus.

[perdomot]

Adam,
I forgot to ask if I should also use the same setting, 23.97 or 29.97 with VDub when I capture that I intend to use when I encode. Does it make a difference if I capture at 29.97 and encode at 23.97? Thanks.

[adam]

With vhs or other captures you have to cap at 29.97fps. From there, you cannot just encode at 23.976fps. You have to do an inverse telecine. Without getting into too much detail, basically film starts at 24fps, is slowed down slightly to 23.976fps and then split into fields. (2 fields=1 frame) The fields are repeated in a 2:3 pattern to increase the fps to 29.97fps. So to reverse this process you have to do an inverse telecine, which removes these extra fields and returns the film back to its original progressive state (no fields.) TMPGenc has an inverse telecine function, but from my experience it is not very good. I'm sure there are some decent IVTC filters you can use through virtual dub, personally I have always used decomb through avisynth.

It sounds like alot of extra work, and I suppose it is, but it really makes a dramatic difference in quality. You have about ~20 less frames to encode every second, so your bitrate goes that much further. With highly compressed formats like VCD and SVCD, this makes all the difference in the world. Now with a VHS source, your quality already may be relatively low depending on the the age and source of these tapes. The extra bitrate you gain through IVTC may not even be worthwhile in your case, and depending on where these tapes came from an IVTC may not even be possible. If these are retail tapes, than IVTC should be possible in most cases. If these are recordings of tv broadcast than you can probably forget about it.

As far as noise reduction, I exclusively work with DV and DVD and in these instances you aren't actually trying to remove noise per se, but just trying to remove some detail to make the movie more compressible. In your case you will probably have relatively noisy sources that you will need to address. Sorry, I can't help you there but there others on this board with more experience there.

[perdomot]

Thanks for the info Adam. I've heard about avisynth but have no idea how to use it. Is there a how-to guide for newbies like me or could you give me some quick & dirty info on this? Thanks again