Much Better MPEG1's

Videot wrote on 9/7/2004, 12:30 AM

It seems that up in Malaysia in addition to all of the pirate DVD's produced they also produces movies onto VCD's. You get a 2 disk set of VCD's for each film, that has a certificate & hologram on each film. These legally produced disks are of MPEG1. What surprises me is that the quality is much, much better than any MPEG1 file I ever managed to create although not nearly as good as MPEG2 however. Is there more than one MPEG1 standard or do they just have better codec?

Comments

stormstereo wrote on 9/7/2004, 2:09 AM

I believe they use hardware encoders. If you go directly from DigiBeta and connect component or SDI the result is outstanding even with Mpeg1. Aaaah, those were the days...(when I had that hardware at my fingertips).

Best/Tommy

farss wrote on 9/7/2004, 4:35 AM

I've done 100s of VCDs, a few from SP masters and yes it can look remarkably good. The mpeg 1 encoder that comes with Vegas is far from the best. I use TMPGEnc which seems pretty popular in Asia and gives results comparable to any of the 'studio' stuff IF (big IF) you're source is as good as theirs. MPEG-1 is even less tolerant of crappy input than mpeg-2, coming off VHS it looks pretty lame although TMPGEnc seems to do a good job of ignoring the noise.
In our travels through China outside of the big stores in the big cities we just couldn't buy a DVD and the players are very uncommon, as is VHS. In the smaller towns one shop used was pressed into service as the 'cinema' at night. A dozen or so locals crammed around some old TV watching a movie played out of a VCD player.

Bob.

johnmeyer wrote on 9/7/2004, 8:03 AM

The "secret" is to do an inverse telecine before encoding. After that, I agree with farss that you should use the TMPGEnc encoder rather than Vegas.

I can't emphasize enough the importance of the inverse telecine. The impact on quality is dramatic. Of course, if you are simply encoding your DV video, then inverse telecine doesn't apply (because it is the process of recovering the 24p film frames from the 29.97 NTSC 3:2 pulldown).

jaegersing wrote on 9/7/2004, 5:38 PM

I live in Singapore, and make many VCDs for local consumption. The latest version of Procoder (V2) produces very nice MPEG1 conversions, and runs around 2.4xrealtime (meaning faster than realtime). As mentioned, the source quality also has a big impact on the final results. All my stuff is in PAL, so I haven't had to handle the intricasies of inverse telecine, thank goodness!

Richard Hunter