What is your source material? You said it was captured as DV, but was this footage that you took yourself, or did it come from off the air or some other source? If the original material was shot on film, you must do Inverse Telecine (in a program like TMPGEnc) before encoding your SVCD, or it will look terrible.

Did you capture this using your video card, or as a pass-through from your DV camera? My ATI Wonder board can capture as DV, but it introduces artifacts that get magnified when encoding to the low bitrates used in SVCD.

Encoding parameters can make a big difference. See my recommendations for TMPGEnc (which does better SVCD encoding) here:

My TMPGEnc recommendations

If you want to try using TMPGEnc for SVCD, you can find a very complete guide here:

TMPGEnc Guide

thanks for the feedback DGrob and johnmeyer.
i'll try your suggestions.

just so you know .. the video is personal video shot on a Sony TRV30. The quality is good. I have also rendered to DVD format and played it on the PC and it looks great. Also tried the minidvd thing ... looks very good on the toshiba standalone but does the audio stutter thing.
but .. the video is shot at highest quality and captured at highest quality via a firewire capture card. THe original video is good ... it's just the SVCD looks like crap. The VCD (mpeg1) encode looks better than the SVCD (mpeg2) encode.

I'll try the above two posters suggestions.

thx.............

Since I got my DVD recorder I haven't burned many SVCDs. Prior to that, however, I spent months trying to perfect the art. Since this was also prior to my purchase of Vegas, I did all my encoding in TMPGEnc. I just pulled up my TMPGEnc SVCD template that resulted from all those months of work and compared it to the Vegas defaults.The only substanative differnece was the encoding bitrate. To make Vegas encode at the max legal SVCD rate, you could change to Constant Bitrate, and set it to 2,520,000. I don't expect this would make too much difference, but it's worth a shot.

The other thing I remember doing that made a difference (and I did this reluctantly) was to use the "Soften Block Noise" in TMPGEnc. Any MPEG encoding is really sensitive to noise, both the kind you get on video in low light, and also the pixelation noise you get in any compessive video encoding (including DV encoding). You might try using one of the VirtualDub noise filters (via PluginPac from Satish) to reduce noise prior to encoding.

I think you will find this will make a BIG difference.

The reason the VCD looks better is the combination of lower resolution and no interlacing. The VCD encode takes bigger chunks of video and therefore doesn't "see" as much of the small noise.

Here's the link to my earlier post about how to use these filters:

VirtualDub Filters to Reduce Noise

Try using the KNRC filter first. Use the default settings (although you should disable it's crop function). Once you get this set up, you can just use the Track FX to load PluginPac; load the noise reduction filter; set the filter strength, and then edit as you normally would.

dragonflyr:

I've had excellent luck producing SVCD's (or more accurately, X-SVCD's) with the stock Vegas MC encoder, using the following settings:

MainConcept MPEG-2

SVCD NTSC (**unless you're in PAL land, of course, but won't PAL players play back NTSC disks?)

Custom template settings

Project Tab:Best Rendering Quality

Video Tab:
480x480
CBR = 2,500,000

Advanced Audio Tab
Write sequence display extension = checked
DC coefficient = 10 bit

I use audio at 48KHz sample rate (DVD-compliant for possible future conversion, when I can afford a DVD burner)

I think the key is to use as high a bitrate CBR as possible. As long as your productions are not longer than 30-40 minutes, they will fit on a single CDR

How are you authoring/burning VCD's and SVCD's? I use version 1 of Ulead DVD MF because it allows non-compliant VCD's and SVCD's, and will not re-encode them unless the user tells it to. Version 2 insists on re-encoding - oh well - I won't buy it.

Because the audio is sampled at 48KHz instead of 44.1, I have a (technically) non-compliant SVCD or X-SVCD. I have a modest 27" tv, and family and friends are amazed at the quality. My Pioneer DVD player will play these disks, as well as a friends Sony, and another friend's Panasonic. None of my productions are over 30 minutes, so fitting it all on a CD is no problem

I've posted similar findings in the past - search on my handle if you wish

I had good luck with the TMPEG encoder as johnmeyer has, but the results with the upgraded MC encoder in V4 were better than the TMPEG, and more convenient, in that all work is now completed within the Vegas environment.

Good Luck

Frenchy

I would have to second John Meyer’s recommendation to try the VirtualDub filters. I recorded Paul McCartney’s concert in Russia that was broadcast on A&E last week and even though I have cable and recorded on SP mode, the VHS recording still had some noise that the MPEG encoder didn’t like. I ran it through VirtualDub with the Dynamic Noise Reduction 2.1 (author: Steven Don/Avery Lee) and that darn thing came out pristine. I made a DVD that looks almost as good as the Back in the U.S.A. DVD that I bought. I was very happy with the VirtualDub filter results.

The old adage, “garbage in garbage out” really applies big-time to MPEG encoding.

~jr

Dragonflyr,

I am using Vegas 3. About a year ago I was doing SVCD and having real problems, some of them could be similar to what you are running into. Here are some findings I posted a while back:


<The main change is in the 'Render As' dialog - tick the box 'Stretch video to fill output frame size (do not letterbox)'.> This was the single BIGGEST improvement.

<The other change is on the custom MPEG settings -> Advanced Video page - tick the 'Write sequence display extension' box (this seems to be an oversight in the supplied template - the MPEG encoding guide says it should be ticked)> Not sure where the "MPEG encoding guide" is but I tried this at the same time I chose the Stretch video function.

<Also found that CBR encoding seems to give better quality than VBR (but then this is not unusual...).> In my case when I tried CBR (constant bit rate)I could not detect any appreciable difference but I'm thinking results would vary based on the project at hand.

You can read the entire thread at
http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=140368

Let us know what works for you.
Mark

dragonflyr:

I agree with JohnnyRoy that Dynamic Noise Reduction is probably the best filter to start with. The reason I didn't recommend it is that I have had problems getting it to work inside of Vegas via PluginPac. It is, however, the simplest and fastest of the various VirtualDub temporal noise filters and should do a good job of removing the crud that causes the MPEG encoding algorithms fits.

Yea, I couldn’t get it to work with the PluginPac Adapter either. Since I had already cut out all the commercials (i.e., did all my editing) by the time I realized I needed this filter, here’s what I did. I ran the separate AVI files through VirtualDub and saved to a new file. Then I right clicked on the original AVI in the Vegas media pool and selected the Replace... option and replaced the old AVI with the new one. It worked like a charm. I never even had to touch the timeline. I just re-rendered to MPEG2 and I was all set. Vegas ROCKS!

~jr