VF 1.0 and poor MPEG quality

Conundrum wrote on 9/9/2002, 1:39 AM

Hi,

I bought VF 1.0 for a while, but never really used it until recently. I used it to edit the MPEG-1 files that were captured with my ATI radeon. I like the editing tool, but the output quality of the MPEG after rendered is poor, has blocks.

I am wondering how the VF 1.0 users get around that. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Comments

randy-stewart wrote on 9/9/2002, 2:27 AM

Conundrum,
Sorry, don't know of anyway around that unless you reduce the size of your viewing frame (down from 720x480 TV size). MPEG-1 is not well suited for a large viewing area. Not enough pixels. For good quality you need digital (.avi) files to start with or maybe MPEG-2 files. Maybe someone else has an idea of how to make the quality better.
Randy

discdude wrote on 9/9/2002, 3:06 PM

There are several ways to improve your final MPEG-1 quality.

1) Don't capture low-bit rate MPEG-1 files. MPEG-1 (as well as most other codecs) don't like recompression. MPEG-1 is a lossy codec which means data is "thrown away" in order to get very small file sizes. Data is thrown away when you initially capture your video and even more data is lost when you recompress you video in VF.

Instead, I suggest capturing with a lossless codec. However, if this eats too much hard drive space (likely), instead capture as high quality video as possible. For your ATI card, this probably means > 6 Mbs VCR or MPEG-2 files. Yes, this takes up plenty of space but this will minimize loss.

2) The Ligos encoder included with VF 1 isn't the best quality. It works well with slower machines but sacrifices quality to do it. Try using another MPEG encoder like the highly regarded TMPG encoder.

http://www.tmpgenc.net/