Gotta agree with Chienworks. I’ve been making Video CD’s for 2 years and I’ve never been completely happy with the quality. It is definitely less that VHS quality. I finally bought a DVD burner. You might try creating a Super Video CD (SVCD) which has double the vertical resolution (480 vs. 240 NTSC) and double the bitrate (2520kbps vs. 1150kbps) and is much better quality than VCD but not as good as DVD. You’ll need another software package like Ulead MovieFactory 2 ($49 USD free trial available) to make an SVCD. VideoFactry only makes VCD. A lot of us here use MovieFactory and it’s worth a free try if you can’t afford a DVD burner yet.

~jr

Arvid just asked one of the questions I was going to ask! I have just made my first VCD and the pixels were as s/he said.
If the quality is better on VHS could chienworks or JohnnyRoy give advice on the best way to record back to tape (into the VCR on the camcorder)? The reason I ask is when I was using VideoWave I was told to change the settings from the monitors 1024 x 768 to (TV ?) 800 x 600 and copy the rendered AVI video from Windows Media Player!
Another question is I rendered the video to MPEG 1, kept clicking the 'next' button to 'make VCD' and nothing happened. I tried this a number of times going from AVI and bringing in an existing file but nothing would work. I produced the VCD through my Easy CD Creator in the end!
Thanks, Joby.
ps. I use ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro video card, analogue Sony 710, 20 and 120 GB hard drives, 384 MB RAM.

Joby, if your computer is fast enough, then playing the .avi file in MediaPlayer is probably the best way to go. Rendering to DV .avi instead of uncompressed will be better because it's a smaller file and your computer will be able to keep up with the data stream faster. If your computer isn't able to play .avi full speed then MPEG at a high bitrate, maybe 4Mbps or higher, is probably the next best choice. Render your file with some extra black/silent time at the beginning and end. 10 seconds should be plenty. Set your resolution to 800x600 because the ATI card won't output to TV at higher resolution. Enable the TV out in the display control panel and start the video playing in media player. During the blank 10 seconds at the beginning, press Alt-Enter to change MediaPlayer to full screen and start the VCR recording. When the video is finished MediaPlayer should leave full screen mode automatically unless you have it set to repeat, in which case press the Esc. key.

One thing i've noticed with the ATI TV out function is that the picture is squished vertically. Everyone will look rather short & fat. I've noticed the same problem with a couple of other cards as well though so i don't think this is an ATI-specific problem.

Thanks chienworks for the speedy reply. Much appreciated.
Joby

Thanks for your help. Arvid

Not what I wanted to hear, but thanks. Arvid

Arvid,

You could try a different MPEG encoder. I would suggest TMPGEnc because it’s free to produce MPEG1 files. (You have to pay to use MPEG2 after the initial 30 trial). What you’ll want to do is render your project to a DV AVI file. Then use TMPEnc to encode the AVI file to a VCD compliant MPEG1 and see if it has less compression artifacts.

As you go through the wizard:

1. Select Video-CD as the target and click Next
2. On the next page select your AVI file and click Next
3. On the next page press the Other Settings button and on the Video tab, change Motion search precision from Normal to High Quality (slow)
4. Then go to the Qualtize Matrix tab and check Output YUV data as Basic YcbCr not CCIR601 and also check Soften block noise
5. Keep clicking Next through the rest of the wizard to render the file.

I find these settings work best but the MainConcept encoder that comes with VideoFactory is just as good. If this doesn’t give you the results you want then its time to buy either a DVD burner or smaller TV set. (VCD’s look better on smaller TV’s because of their limited resolution and bitrate)

~jr