I just finished making my first VCD and I'd like to share some of the things that may be helpful to the rest of you who are just starting out.

I used a Bravado 1000 to digitize the video from VHS at 320x240. Premiere was used for edits (mainly just exporting audio for tweaking in Cool Edit Pro). With the fixed audio in premiere, I applied a Resize Filter to the video track. I then made sure the project settings were correct (resolution, frame rate, audio, etc). Then I exported the entire work area using the Panasonic encoder. I selected VCD/NTSC, everything else default, except weak noise filter, and adaptive weak video filter. Encoding took a long time, but at last I had the mpeg file ready to burn. I used the VCD Creator bundled with Adaptec Easy CD Creator Pro. Just follow the steps in the wizard and you're ready to go.

When I went to play the VCD in my Pioneer 414 DVD Player, it recognized it as a compact disc, and a VCD. However, the playback sucked. It looked like the mpeg data was corrupted, with very jerky playback and lots of blocks of solid color. I turned off the dvd player and turned it back on. This time the playback was much better, but there were still occasional glitches in the audio and video. I switched the DVD player off and on once more, and the playback perfect.

I hope this helps, and I would also like to thank everyone who posts answers on this message board. They were all very useful in my first attempt at creating a VCD.

-- John Danks (jdanks@technologist.com), June 22, 2000

Answers

Try different CD media. DVD players are more picky about media than other players. Try CD-RW and see if that works better. (I had trouble with VCD's made with Adaptec doing the same thing in my Philips player, which does have a bad reputation on homemade VCDs, but using CeQuadrat VideoPack 4.0 and cheap CD-RW media I get good playback). Anyway, see if different media helps.

-- Frankie G (frankG74@hotmail.com), June 23, 2000.

I think the most likely culprit is the resize filter in Premiere. Several different sources all say that this filter is known to cause jerky playback after exporting.

I would suggest either capturing at 352X240 (NTSC) to begin with. If you can't, leave it at 320X240 and let Panasonic do the resizing to VCD spec for your format (NTSC / PAL).

-- EG Marshall (4me@schoolmail.com), June 25, 2000.