indeed that was my first reaction, but he rendered and burned a vcd for me of one of my projects (long story) which I just felt looked unsharp, even on the TV. i checked his settings myself, there were absolutely no plugins on the chain at all.

i have since generated a vcd compliant with TMPGenc of the same material, exactly same source and codec etc, and it is MUCH sharper ... I'll gladly post visual comparisons on the board so ppl can see what I'm on about.

i really want vv3 to rock, it's just so much nicer to use than premiere and the audio side is absolutely awesome. but if i can't get sharp output that's a helluva showstopper!

well, I don't think I'm dreaming it ... take a look at these pics, and although they are jpegs, yes, you can still see the definite softening done by the VV3 render.

is anyone else able to run a side-by-side comparison and post the results??

http://www.cluscon.co.uk/tmp/tmpgenc-vv3.JPG
http://www.cluscon.co.uk/tmp/tmpgenc-vv3-ZOOM.JPG

Sir, I'm very puzzled by how you get the results...

I tried using the TMPGENC MPEG-2 and then the MainConcept... the TMPGENC is worse! There's more artifacts and you can see more compression.

I'm so stumped!

Asaf

Sir, give me your email address - i want to send you two MPEG-2 files 250K each, two seconds--- it's just text that i used with the vegas program.

Compare both of them and you'll see there's absolutely no difference,

so I'm not sure if you used MPEG-1 or MPEG-2. Which one was it?

Sir: I realize that we're talking about two different things: you said a "VCD" compliant not "DVD" -- no wonder...

I will look into your findings on the MPEG1 and let you know if I see the same results.
-AB

Sir:

You are correct! 100% correct. The MainConcept MPEG1 sucks big time compared to TMC's MPEG1 encoder. Sonic Foundry, you better fix this!

However, I found from my tests that the MPEG2, i repeat MPEG2 (DVD-Video) encoder is MUCH better than TMC.

Here's my conclusion for you: Are you going to do DVD (which is the future) or are you going to stick with VCD? If you are going to upgrade to DVD, then yes, I highly recommend VV3 - I'm sure Sonic Foundry will fix this.

Personally for me when I read your post I was really scared because I spend a lot of money on VV3 and I did not want to first save to AVI, then use another MPEG encoder. I am going to get a DVD burner and I will never ever use the MPEG1 encoder, because it is old technology in my opinion. MPEG2 is much much better quality anyway, and DVD is the future.

However I find it so wierd: the TMGEnc is WORSE than MainConcept for DVD-quality, but the TMGEnc is BETTER than MainConcept for MPEG1!

Cheers,

Asaf

A lot of apples verses oranges stuff. You can fiddle more with TMPG and thus can get sharper results with MPEG-1 (VCD) sometimes anyhow, however MANY things enter into the mix so a blanket statement one is better than the other is misleading. It depends on the source file and also what if anything you do in Vegas Video prior to rendering or if or not you mess with the source file and do preprocessing in VitrualDub.

This is one of those kind of debates that go nowhere like over on VCD help where there is endless and sometimes heated "discussion" on the superiority of VCD verses SVCD or no wait, XVCD and also the speed of Pentium 4 verses a 1400 Mhz AMD etc.. You're better off with dual Pentium, no wait you're better with RAID drives, no, no. Come on guys... This is all very subjective. Just because one file looks better doing A,B,C, does not mean doing A, B, C, D on some other file won't give different results.

You are definitely correct on that. However, just for your information, when I performed these tests I used the same IDENTICAL AVI file. Then, rendered to MPEG1 using Video Vegas' MainConcept MPEG1 encoder. Played it back.

Okay, then, used TMC, IDENTICAL AVI file, played it back. Much better.

The conclusion is that there are a lot of settings that you can tweak in TMC and MainConcept, so overall sir, you are right that it really depends on many things.

I was just confirming what the first person wrote about the softness issue. I was able to see exactly what he was talking about- basically, MainConcept is softer using DEFAULT settings than TMP's DEFAULT setings. However, the catch is that for each MPEG encoder, the DEFAULT settings are different.

Exactly. The default settings are different. Different settings yield different results. If anyone is into making VCD's for now minus a DVD burner you can probably get the best* results using TMPG and two pass set a a variable rate. The process is slow torture even with a fast PC. What you end up with is a non compliant XVCD. The catch 22 is it won't play on a lot of DVD players. So burn a small portion on a CD-RW and test your DVD player first.

* try one of the custom templates at VCD Help, then tweak for your own needs. Expect anywhere from 10 to 1 to 15 to 1 rendering times typical for 1000Mhz upwards. The softness of default MC MPEG-1 can to some extent be offset with the unsharpen filter. Caution... a little goes a long way.

thanks for everyone's help and suggestions on this, however I have performed some more testing and come to the conclusion that the softening is happening (only in vegas remember) as it hooks into an external hardware codec (my case the DC1000, MPEG2 IPPP frames)

I have since printed the DC1000 AVI to DV the captured that into Vegas over DV once more, then rendered that to VCD compliant, this time with SATISFACTORY results. whew!

Basically I'm looking at migrating to a totally software (DV) environment since Vegas gives good realtime-ish previews (Duron 950MHz) because the DC1000 is so goddamn unstable!! nice card when it works though.

I'll be mastering back to DV/DVCAM and maybe get into DVD when I can afford it ... or maybe when the standalone recorders cost less than 1000UKP :-)

Basically I'm using VCD as an archive format for some of my older projects since it's cheap and (hopefully) future-proof being MPEG based 'n all. BTW rendering a 30min DV AVI to VCD MPEG1 took 2hours, so 4:1 render time is quicker than MPEG2 as well !!

once again, thanks for all the help. Now I just have to save some pennies and get MY copy of vegas registered ....

I wouldn't archive future DV projects to VCD simply because of the limited bitrate regarless who's codec you use. Since MPEG is a highly compressed format you'll lose bits and there simply is no way to get them back. So if you are happy with the quality of the VCD's, as-is fine, however MPEG-1 isn't close to DV quality.