what i need to make vcd in my pc ? "ALL THE components"

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minimun sepcs, please. recomend hdd , cd-r burner , mpeg-1 capture board, space in hdd, software, and the way to do it? etc. ?

-- SA SY Superior (bufeo@hotmail.com), December 15, 1999

Answers

Read all the answers on this site and combine them, ok Dick. You got that all right. Each answer will tell you what to do. Now Dick, remember read first ok buddy.

-- The Lone Ranger (rutger_s@hotmail.com), December 16, 1999.

To Lone Ranger: It's understandable you don't want to post an answer, but what? Everybody has to read all the complete forum (maybe 1000+ msg by now) before posting a question? If so, then what is the convenience of this forum? Better go to an encyclopaedia and read it from A to Z (at least it will be alphabetically ordered).

-- Matias (petrellm@telefonica.com.ar), December 16, 1999.

There is an option to search before posting a question. The forum maintaner kindly asks people to find the answer before posting a similar one. This will eliminate redundancy. Obviously Matias, you suffer fro dummy redundancy.

In answer to this stupidly repeated question. There is no good method. It is mostly try and see. What one perons does may not work for you. What hardware people recommend may not work on your system. If you have linux or Windows NT forget it. It is too much work. If you have older Windows 3.1, forget it. For Windows 95 and 98 just find a card that will work with your crappy computer. God. If you want the whole spec sheet, then tell us what hardware you have and the speed of the machine. NO PENTIUM IS GOING TO CAPTURE VIDEO IN NEAR VHS QUALITY.

-- The Lone Ranger (rutger_s@hotmail.com), December 16, 1999.


The search engine on this site is not up to scratch and I think that is what causes a problem. Posters try it but then resort to asking the question direct or worse, never to be seen on the site again as a result of an answer that redirects them to the same never ending cirle.

This morning I replied to a Digital 8 question and I looked for what I may have said before. Simple, I put in "digital 8" Digital+8 acceptable forms of maintaining the string on other sites but this engine gives all of the "digital" all of the 8's and then all of the "digital 8" as a string mixed in. In some cases I have had 100's of entries to search through and I give up and therefore resort to repeating myself because its easy and more convient for the person asking the question.

If you want the string then thats what you should get not 100's of un related entries based on the individual words in the string.

So Lone Ranger and others, if you are asking people to read other postings to get information on this site then you are to some extent asking for a pipe dream because its a frustrating mess to get the good information that exists here. I wonder if it would provide a list of all my postings by puting in "Ross McL" like one can do on other search sites. Must try it!

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), December 16, 1999.


No not all of them, Lone Ranger I bet you have more than a total of 150 postings to your name.

The other thing I forgot to add, if the search request orignates from the VCD forum why the hell do we get the results from the whole greenspun web site? I sure as hell do not want to know about sex in Hawaii as part of a search on VCD related issues.

Anyway is anyone going to help SA SY?

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), December 16, 1999.



feel guilty now?

This is a list of the stuff I have as a system which gives me an excellent video CD as the end product. What works for me may not work for you or anyone else - I have the advantage or dis advantage of having worked in PC editing for 4+ years and therefore my vcd's are NLE orientated.

This same system produces a better image quality on VHS tape but the standard of the VCD image is great and very acceptable and in the end is less work whilst there is a MS imposed limit of 2 or 4G on most application software.

Computer: 2 year old 233mmx pentium with 64M Sdram, 4G Fireball system drive (5400rpm) and a 10G Maxtor (7200rpm) hdd devoted to video. Video card is now a Voodoo3 3000 PCI, sound card a Turtle Beach Montego II, Burner is an old edi 2x Ricoh 6200A which has done in excess of 300 burns with few problems. I also have a dual PCMCIA drive for reading my still camera images and a scuzzy 600dpi base line flat bed scanner. Capture cards are an old analogue Miro (Pinnacle) DC20 of 4+ years age and more recently an ADS Pyro firewire dv card. All captures are at full frame size and are video for windows avi's of type 1 or 2. PAL analogue compression around 7:1. Digital dv compression around 5:1 which allows about 19 minutes of video to be captured for each 4G of disk space.

Editing Software - Analogue supported operations of the past: Premiere 5.1c, Hollywood fx 8 and Photoshop 5.5, Ulead media studio pro 5.2 but not used, a very poor second to Adobe Premiere 5.1c.

At present only Ulead Video Studio supports the Pyro card but that will change soon I hope as I would like to and will get back to professional quality editing with premiere.

Burner software: Nero, WinonCD 3.5 and Video Pack 4 (essential if your going to do menu based vcd's otherwise Nero in my view is the best of those that only support simple vcd's). I use Nero to check the compliance of my vcd mpeg-1 files as that is the only software which actually checks compliance and tells you where the problem lies if there is one.

Computer Playback of vcd's, mpeg-1 & mpeg-2's: Cyberlinks PW Powerplayer or vcd Powerplayer. LSX Plugin for Windows media player. All with full computer screen playback despite only being a 233mmx.

Mpeg Encoders: LSX v3 & v2.51, Panasonic 2.21 and limited use of that which is supplied with Ulead and the Pyro card. Ulead allows direct resizing of a full frame digital image from the timeline but has trouble providing quality encodes from video containing panned motion. The Panasonic encoder will also resize on the fly but the output as a mpeg-1 file does not reliably cope with crawl or rolling credits. It also does not always encode a compliant sound file which must be "stereo" to comply. It often encodes a non compliant "2 channel" sound file from the same source that LSX v3 and Ulead VS3 give compliant "stereo" files. I encode/resize to vcd sizes using the miro capture board codec as the source (type 2 avi), its faster and more reliable.

CD-R media: I prefered Mitsui golds but are currently running and selling my products on Kodak Silvers. They both look the same.

I am PAL based and use, after considerable testing, a Philips 725 DVD player, long since superceded.

Finally: get your VCD's operational on your computer and THEN buy your dvd player in that order and only after testing in the shop BEFORE you buy with one of your home brewed products.

So there you have it, its all open for all to critise as impossible!

Cheers.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), December 17, 1999.


A hell of an answer Ross!! ;)

To end this polemic I'm not gonna answer the "fro dummy redundancy" which I'm suffering of according to you L.Ranger. I'm only telling you that if you don't like people making questions, either keep your mouth shut or get off the forum (maybe this is not for you) but DON'T FLAME THEM. There are many newbies to VCD that incorporates here everyday and they are not obliged to read all the accumulated messages before asking.

-- Matias (petrellm@telefonica.com.ar), December 17, 1999.


That is great Ross. Now what happens if he/she needs NTSC encoding? That is the whole point of my post. Of all the people who posted on this question only Ross, me, and Matias answered. It would be nice if the originator answered back. I asked him/her what hardware he/she had and what speed PC he/she was using. I got not reply to that. I mean this guy or girl could be using a regular non-MMX Pentium or worse a Cyrix CPU. Ross, you machine differs from mine. Your setup may not work for me unless I try it out. If it does not work, I have to go back and ask again. It would be so much easier if Sa Sy would tell this forum at least what Video Card, how much ram on the video card, the speed of the computer, how much ram on the computer, and which type of CD-R he or she had. If this person had a Pentium 133 with 16 mbs of ram and a 1mb Video card, do you think he/she could capture video without problems?

-- The Lone Ranger (rutger_s@hotmail.com), December 17, 1999.

Spot on Lone Ranger, it would be nice if the poster told us more, but we could say that about most postings here. I still think its better to answer and maybe draw some comment - always hopeful I am?????? Others might call it something else .......

Like Matias I dislike the "dumb" type attitude as well - from a VCD subject point of view, initially we are all "dumb" even you were once. Thats why we come to a web site for help. Being told that first time up is a turn off.

I certainly do not intend that someone should go out and copy the system, but it is nice to get first hand information on a working system. Even the trail of used burner programs must indicate something to someone starting out and asking for help before buying.

Finally I am always surprised that so many who make contact off line are persons with english not their native tongues. Imagine you, Lone Ranger and me trying the same on a German or Spanish site, hell I would really be "dumb" and offended if someone told me so first time up.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), December 19, 1999.


Lone Ranger,

Forgot to comment on this from your posting:

"If this person had a Pentium 133 with 16 mbs of ram and a 1mb Video card, do you think he/she could capture video without problems?"

I will answer this as follows:

In firewire - capture is unlikely to be a problem if its associated with one the latest 7200rpm Maxtor drives, an edi will do it. Experience with the marvellous ADS firewire card makes it possible to say that (you did not say with what card, so now the guy can go out and buy a ADS PYRO Card and get the right hdd for dedicated video and be on the way for a few hundred bucks).

A mate of mine has a slow old 133 which we clocked up to 166 in the end and he bought a 15G 7200rpm maxtor edi and it captures frame drop free, full PAL frames of 720 x 576 at 25.000fps and at 3.5M/s. Believe this or not, his capture system runs faster than mine (better drive) as tested by two video capture test programs I use to keep tabs on performance, never mind Norton bench marking it means very little! He is able to run consistantly at 10200+k/s read/write whilst my earlier 10G maxtor just makes the 10000k/s but averages in the 9900's - so capture card and drive are the important factors for capture.

The system does not have to be a Pentium to be effective in capture but be aware that some NLE programs are designed specifically for use with a Pentium processor and do not run without problems in other computer types.

Analogue capture - no way in hell (I started with a 586 Cyrix at a speed of 100 and it ran at less than 1M/s (full frame), hopeless). I cannot comment on the likes of the Snazzi cards or those that capture directly into the mpeg format at non full frame sizes as I have no experience to fall back on.

As I have said before you do not need the greatest high flyer to get involved with video and VCD's. Indeed you can get away with a lower standard of PC than those going out to video tape. Most manufacturers give minimum specs to cover themselves, for the ADS card they state 233mmx but as described it is running effectively at lower levels than that.

Processing the captured video will be extremly slow with such a system and it will drive ya nuts waiting. Also processing requires playing back the vision.

Playing the vision back on the computer screen or TV is a different matter altogether (but you did not ask that, your question related only to capture) since the 1 meg video card (my mate is only using 2M) and 16M of ram will limit the size of the picture and will only allow playing it as though it was jumping over a hurdle and off the screen as well, probably with choppy sound as an added bonus - needs upgrading for sure????

Finally, the manufacturer will suggest certain tweeks to apply to the computer to allow effective NLE processing and those associated with the ADS card are actually opposite to those employed for analogue. Just one example, read ahead full on for ADS, full off for miro analogue.

So how did I do?

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), December 19, 1999.



Wow!

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@hotmail.com), December 21, 1999.

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