VCD Rendering Advise

nicholasong wrote on 7/15/2006, 3:00 AM

I capture a clip from a DV and rendered it to MainConcept Mempeg-1. Everything was ok when I play it on my computer monitor . But when I play it on TV, it seems a little bit zoomed in as I cannot see some of the text or picture at all corners..... I've tried PAL and NTSC template. Please help . Thanks.

Comments

farss wrote on 7/15/2006, 3:44 AM

The MC encoder is very bad at doing mpeg-1 as used on VCDs.
Get a copy of TPMEGenc from www.pegasys-inc.com/

The mpeg-1 only version is free and way better for VCD encodes than Vegas or Nero.

Even then VCD is roughly half the resolution of DVD and SD video so don't expect miracles.
Bob.

Grazie wrote on 7/15/2006, 3:48 AM

I've done MPEG-1 encodes thru' TMPGEnc and I tell you for nothing, I find it really difficult to see the difference between my BEST format in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 DVDs I do. I'm serious!

It has a great user interface - even I can use it - and additional options to save templates. Great freeware.

farss wrote on 7/15/2006, 4:13 AM

And to author, use Nero. Unfortunately it doesn't do everything the VCD spec supports but I've never been able to find a better authoring tool and it's good enough for most things.

I agree with Grazie about VCD quality. In the past I did 100s that went to China. Mostly they were from off air VHS and they looked absolutely horrible. And then I did a few from BetaSp and DB and they looked awesome. Plus we've got a few shop bought (in China) VCDs and the good ones do look good. On a 14" TV fed via composite you'd need a good eye to pick the difference between them and DVDs. On a 24" TV fed component it does start to show, particularly with Chinese fonts.

BTW, there's another 'VCD' format, CVD. It seems most DVD players will play the format even though it's not part of the DVD spec and it uses a half D1 frame that's also supported by the DVD spec, you can encode to that and use the same file in a VCD and a DVD, except DVDA doesn't support it :(

Still now that blank DVDs are not that much more expensive than CDs I guess it's all rather academic.

Bob.

Bob.

rs170a wrote on 7/15/2006, 4:14 AM

...I cannot see some of the text or picture at all corners

For TV viewing, you need to make sure you're staying within the "action safe area" and/or the "title safe area" to be certain that you'll see everything you want to see.
The guides for this are enabled in the preview window. The settings are in Preferences.

Mike

johnmeyer wrote on 7/15/2006, 10:01 AM

If you get TMPGEnc, it not only does a better job of encoding VCD, but also offers better resolution formats that can also be encoded on a CD rather than a DVD.

You didn't say why you want to use VCD format. If you simply want to encode to a CD, and your video isn't too long, I suggest you look into making an "SVCD" which uses interlaced video at 480x480. I recently had reason to go back and look at a bunch of SVCDs that I did with TMPGEnc many years ago, before I was creating DVDs, and they look extremely good (not as good as DVD, but WAY better than VCD). There are lots of tricks to getting good SVCD quality, but I have some SVCD template that I spent many hours creating which I'd be happy to share.

Finally, I recently had a reason to take some of these SVCD encodes and put them on a DVD -- along with regular DVD content. I searched around and found a way to copy the SVCD content, without any re-encoding whatsoever, to a DVD and get my DVD player to play it. Worked perfectly on the various DVD players I tried it on, and it worked on the client DVD player as well. The only thing what was odd was during fast forward, the picture would double in size. As soon as play resumed, everything looked normal again.