Help stop the jaggies

Tonypfei wrote on 7/11/2002, 9:35 AM
I have been fooling around trying to find a good format to save video long term so I can use it later. e.g. when my 2 year old gets married I can put together a through the years type video to show. The standard mpeg 1 template gets too "jaggie" if thats the right term. It looks like the mpeg 2 format will be too big I would like about 20 to 30 minutes to fit on a 700 meg cd. Can the mpeg2 settings be changed like mpeg 1. I don't want to buy the plugin if its not going to at least come close to what I want. I have tried changing the bitrate in mpeg 1 but it will not render unless it is one of the preset bitrates, it comes up with an error cause unknown. Do I need to change other settings when changing the bitrate, is there some multiple that I need to adhere to, is there a website that explains all this?

Comments

Former user wrote on 7/11/2002, 9:58 AM
Try www.vcdhelp.com
Tonypfei wrote on 7/12/2002, 8:27 AM
thanks I will.
the_ripper wrote on 7/12/2002, 9:26 AM
I have been using SVCD. You can easily fit 30 mins on a CD, Mpeg2 SVCD Quality. The one I produced was 31 mins, at about 532v megs, 32 mins....the_ripper
BillyBoy wrote on 7/12/2002, 1:19 PM
"I have been fooling around trying to find a good format to save video long term so I can use it later. e.g. when my 2 year old gets married I can put together a through the years type video to show."

Assuming you want decent quality, converting down to MPEG-1 when your source is digital (I'll assume you're using a digital camera) is foolish because of the horrible hit you're going to take in lost quality. The technology is changing rapidly. For sure twenty or more years from now quality will be way better and then trying to convert a low quality VCD file or SVCD (if either is even supported that far in the future)will guarantee nothing but regrets.

Either save the raw tape "as-is" or edit it now and then save back to DV tape or bite the bullet and save to today's highest medium which would be burning a DVD disc.

The simple fact is neither VCD or SVCD offers high quality because of the very limited bitrates those formats demand. If you're talking about saving precious memories especially if you intend to stich years worth together at some point in the future you do NOT want to reduce the source quality. Both VCD and SVCD employ HEAVY compression. Once you go that route you can't put what's removed during the compression back. Its lost forever and you'll be sorry.
SJH wrote on 7/22/2002, 11:26 PM
Like the other post said, simply save your source tapes -- and make sure that when your two-year-old gets married you still have a compatible player or camera in excellent condition. As someone involved with music recording for enough years, I can assure you that saving ALL your source tapes is the way to go. You might want to also consider making safety copies (backups) if you can score another compatible camera. This way, you're preserving the original footage, at its original resolution.

And certainly, sending your edited movie back into your camera would also be great, providing you have the RCA outs (or Firewire, etc.) on your video card.

Good luck.