VCD - Sony vs. Adobe

djcc wrote on 3/22/2004, 11:33 AM
I've made a number of VCD's with MS. Not as good as DVD, but it is keeping me satisfied until I finally breakdown and buy a DVD burner.

Quality is not bad at all - the most noticeable difference is in transitions - horrible pixelization during transitions, but still images, pan/zoom, etc are all pretty good.

Over the weekend, I received an VCD someone made with Adobe Premier and noticed some differences. First, every VCD I make is shown to have 2 tracks according to my DVD player whereas the Adobe VCD only shows a single track. Any idea why?

The other is quality. The VCD from Premier was virtually indistinguishable from a DVD... transitions were smooth, not at all pixelated like the ones I get with MS.

I always thought the low-res transitions resulted from the VCD format - but this example makes it look like it is possible to achieve fantastically better results on VCD than I am getting. Anyone know why? Is it just a matter of a $600 piece of software vs. a $100?

=Don=

Comments

Chris_Carroll wrote on 3/23/2004, 4:14 AM
There are two VCD standards...VCD and SVCD. The latter uses MPEG-II compression and should provide a much better image...at the cost of running time. Maybe this could explain the difference?
IanG wrote on 3/23/2004, 6:20 AM
I'm far from sure, but I think the SVCD standard requires a minimum of 2 tracks.

Ian G.
djcc wrote on 3/23/2004, 7:14 AM
The MS manual specifically states that it encodes to the VCD 2.0 format, not SVCD. Both of the discs I referenced in my first message are VCDs as evidenced by their use of a directory named "VCD". According to the DVDR site, this folder would be named SVCD if it were one.

Which takes me right back to wondering why Adobe Premier would produce a VCD (MPEG-1) with such smooth transitions and MS transitions are so heavily pixelated.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 3/23/2004, 7:31 AM
I don’t believe Adobe Premiere makes VCD’s per se’. Premiere is an editor which could render to MPEG1 with any number of plugins. Find out what they used to encode to MPEG1 and what they used to author the VCD. TMPEnc is very good at encoding MPEG1 with high quality. This is what I used when I use to make VCD’s.

~jr
djcc wrote on 3/23/2004, 11:17 AM
Unfortunately, I have no way to directly contact the author - the VCD was created by my son's preschool, and the person has since moved out of state. I remember speaking to him 6 months ago, and he told me he used Adobe Premier to do it, which sparked my interest in doing something similar - when I saw the pricetag of Premier and Vegas, I took a closer look at MS, which does everything I need it to at the moment.

Is there any way I can generate an MPEG1 from MS using some other encoder?

Thanks again.
=Don=
IanG wrote on 3/23/2004, 3:21 PM
>Is there any way I can generate an MPEG1 from MS using some other encoder?

You could render your slideshow as an avi and then convert it to MPEG1 using TMPGEnc. Have you tried using MS to render to MPEG1 on your hd and checking the results? For a while I was getting very poor results with my own VCDs, while commercial ones were fine. It turned out the problem was with my DVD player - the MPEGs were fine.

Ian G.
djcc wrote on 3/23/2004, 9:01 PM
There is no difference between the MPEG-1 on my HD and the VCD.... I'll try your suggestion regarding the other encoder, provided I can D/L it... will post my results.
djcc wrote on 3/24/2004, 5:40 PM
Here are a few results. I tried TMPGenc. There was not a significant difference on my TV between the VCD created from the TMPGenc MPG file and the MPG created with MS. But there were differences.....

The MS version of the MPEG-1 plays back larger by default in the MS media player even though the template suggests it will only be 352x240. The TMPGenc version plays back at 352 x 240.

In this particular video, MS files sizes are 1.15 GB AVI, 73Mb MPEG-1, 174 Mb MPEG-2. The MPEG-1 file generated from the AVI by TMPGenc was only 52 Mb.

Overall, some transitions appeared SLIGHTLY smoother in the TMPGenc version, but others were worse. Overall, artifacting seemed slightly worse in TMPGenc.

So, interesting stats, but I am still no closer to understanding why a VCD produced with Adobe Premier has very smooth transitions, and VCDs produced with MS are very pixelated.
djcc wrote on 3/25/2004, 2:39 PM
BTW, when I used the TMPGEnc encoder, I just left all settings at default. Does anyone have experience changing these to produce better results, and if so, what changes did you make?

=Don=
JohnnyRoy wrote on 3/26/2004, 3:42 PM
> Does anyone have experience changing these to produce better results, and if so, what changes did you make?

Check out the Video page on my web site. Down towards the bottom I have links to the TMPGEnc templates that I used when I made SVCD's and VCD’s. This was the best I could get at the time.

I would have given you a direct link to the templates but I’m about to redesign my site and the links to the files will probably change but I’ll keep the video page link the same.

~jr
djcc wrote on 3/26/2004, 6:26 PM
JR - I saw your templates, but what do I do with them? If you deviated from the default settings, any chance i could get you to explain why?

Thanks!
=Don=