MAKING YOUR OWN VCD's

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Video CD : One Thread

The number of "how to do it" postings prompts me to start a thread that gives some details of the many ways to achieve a VideoCD (standard type is a data rate of 1150/225 kbit/s) and if other successful brewers add to it, new posters and old to this forum will benifit.

1) DIGITAL VIDEO AVI BASED SYSTEM:

Source video captured with a firewire 1394 capture card such as ADS Pyro at 3.6M/s or 216M for every minute of video - maximum segment length is 9 minutes or 2G. Requires DV source material and most systems capture only in full frame sizes. 720 x 576 PAL 720 x 480 NTSC. Analogue source material will require copying to the DV format first, usually via the camera. Svideo connections give by far the best image quality.

The frame sizes quoted above appear to conflict with the accepted, on this site, frame size at 704 wide. Stretched or compressed horizontals may result because the DV capture codec cannot usually be resized but only cropped.

EDIT: in an Non Linear Editing (NLE) program like Adobe Premiere 5.1. This program will accept up to 4 hours on the timeline in blocks of 9 minutes. Add titles transitions etc during the edit. A free capture program is currently available to capture type 2 avi's for Premiere as it does not currently support the type 1 avi that is associated with firewire cards.

OUTPUT: a) Panasonic Mpeg or with bbMPEG plugin encoders direct from the timeline - output limit is only the capacity of the CD-r or rw. Comparative test have shown these two to be among the best if not the best.

b) output to full frame DV avi in maximum of 2G or 9 minute blocks and use the capability of the bbMPEG stand alone encoder to resize and batch the files into one output mgpeg. If the stand alone Panasonic encoder is used the limit will be up to about 35 minutes of video per track only.

AUTHOR THE VCD: Burner software to suit - Adaptec, Nero or WinonCD.

Menu or interactive structured VCD with Adaptec or VideoPack4.

This system does not require a high flying computer, I personally only have a 233mmx pentium and a close friend has only a 166 and is doing VCD's as indicated above. Rendering/production times are however longer with the slow cpu speeds. I use the standard default settings except with Panasonic I use weak filtering.

PLAYING BACK:

My DVD player is a Philips DVD 725 and will not play higher data rate VCD's than the standard 1150/224kbit/sec.

On the computer I use a RealMagic Hollywood Plus (also sold as a DVDmagic Pro) PCI decoder card which can be used with a DVDrom and a CDrom to provide smooth as silk full screen pictures on the computer (remember my computer is only a 233) and will connect to a TV in svideo or composite and provide on the fly conversion between NTSC and PAL video formats. This has been far better than any software player I have used.

I previously used both of CyberLinks programs, VCD PowerPlayer and the PowerPlayer Wizard which provides DVD playback as well. I do not use Windows Media Player because it is incapable of play full screen images in the correct 4:3 format.

2) ANALOGUE VIDEO AVI BASED SYSTEM:

I began in analogue and the captured video is handled in the same way but the computer needs to be a much later version with faster CPU speeds and hard drives. Most analogue cards can resize during capture and produce a smaller size file. In such cases the requirements for the computer are less and therefore hard disk drives maybe smaller to achieve the same end product. SVideo connections provide a higher quality than composite connections.

Image quality of an analogue system will only approach that of the DV based system described in 1) if the full frame capture data rate is at least 4M/s or 240M/minute of video.

================= Come on those guys who use a mpeg based system, spend a few minutes describing your system and add to this thread for us all to understand - remember its a standard data rate VCD we are initially talking about here but maybe only the authoring changes for all the others types and can therefore be added with a suitable DVD player nominated that can play High rate VCD's and or SVCD's. =================

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 01, 2000

Answers

Well this is not going to be nowhere near as much detail as Ross's post, but here is what i do being an mpeg capturer

i use a piece of hardware called the Dazzle dvc. This lets me capture video into my pc bit it captures items as an mpeg format, not avi. Their is no resizing when capturing in mpeg (at least not for the type of card i have) it captures at the 352x240 size. it does offer a few templates at which you can capture and they all range in quality. it does feature a video cd template so however you capute you can just burn it as that and your done. HOWEVER unless your on crack i would not recommend that method at all. i push this card to its limit (movie quality) with a 3000bit capture so i have something close to my video. As far as this 2-4gig limit goes. All i can say is i was capturing once at 3000bit, i fell asleep and ended up having a 2 hour file. For my audio it offers the typical steroe and mono as well as data settings for sudio. i use something on it called "post process" which after capturing it sysncs up my sound and picture. Capturing in "realtime" can sometimes screw up your sync

OUTPUT: once im done capturing i use the lovely Panasonic encoder to convert my 3000 bit to a vcd format. Although the conversion time this encoder takes leaves something to be desired. Once this is done i use either the adaptec 4.0 or the nti cd maker pro and burn it to vcd. i then pop it in one of my dvd players and sitback just waiting to go crazy at every(if any) little cd glitch from burning or the media used

other forms of mpeg: another thing to do is i also make a highrate vcd. this involves all the steps listed above except that when i encode on the panasonic i change it to "mpeg system" then i change the data rate to 2500. i also change the vbr buffer rate to 150 and convert it. once doen i use the nti because it allows a high rate vcd to be made. the adaptec does not. After its done i sit back and watch.

-- Doug (mazinz@aol.com), March 01, 2000.


its not that im a bad speller, its just that im not the best at typing so forgive the typos, and me for not correcting them before hitting the submit button

-- Doug (mazinz@aol.com), March 01, 2000.

Well, I might be odd-man out here... I'm having trouble getting it to work, and that's why I showed up!

Here's my situation, and I'd appreciate anyone chiming in to make it clearer.

Using Digital8, capturing viaFireWIre through IntroDV (Digital Origin) software/hardware. After editing, I can output a variety of file formats. But what I'm stuck on is, which format? I understand I need to scale the picture downward, but to what data rates for A/V, but none of the plug-in and MPEG compressors seems to have a 1- button "Make VCD format" that I need. I'm not dumb, but there are quite a few options and tweaks in these control panels. And After 7 or 8 nights of processing video test clips, and getting unusuable results the next morning, I'm ready to throw in the towel.

Ross and Doug have helped... I'd like to make a high-rate DVD and try it out in a store to help decide which DVD I want to buy. But I also want to archive and transfer movies of the kids.

So I've got these edited DV streams on my hard drive, saved by IntroDV as (I guess) lossless .mov files. My question is, what do I use to make them into the right format for high-rate VCD, and what settings within that software do I use?

I'll keep posting results in case it's valuable to anyone else.

Kirk

P.S. If you're looking for inexpensive FireWire capture, the IntroDV card offers terrific quality for $200. And Dazzle has just released what looks to be the same hardware in their own package, for $100. I plan on checking it out. (But I still need help making VCDs!)

Thanks.

-- Kirk James (kirkhere@mailandnews.com), March 02, 2000.


Kirk

A lot of people have trouble getting to a VCD from .mov files, so your not in isolation. A friend in the States after spending weeks and getting nowhere made contact and now successfully uses the Panasonic encoder which in your case would have to be the standalone version. I would also suggest you try the free bbmpeg stand alone DV encoder but I do not know if it will handle "all" media, its sure worth a try and using avi's as a base its equally as good if not better.

http://members.home.net/beyeler/bbmpeg.html

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 02, 2000.


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