I am capturing mpeg on Ulead Video Studio 4.0 SE. I save my finished movie to NTSC VCD format with 720 x 480. I then use Nero 5.0 to burn the VCD, but the movie ends up as low quality and 352 x 240 size. Playback is full screen on the TV, but looks like it is under water on both my Pioneer DVD player and PC DVD player. Any suggestions on how to improve?

-- Markus Duffin (duffin@slip.net), January 09, 2001

Answers

I don't how this is working unless you've turned off Nero's VCD compliance checking. 720 X 480 video is definitely not VCD compliant. If you are truly burning a 720 X 480 video, you have made what is called a XVCD, which is an unsupported (ie. it may or may not work) format. NTSC VCD does not allow for anything above 352 X 240 and there is nothing you can do about it if you want to make a compliant VCD. SVCD, which allows for higher bit rates, also allows for 480 X 480 under NTSC. I'm not real keen on VCD because I think the quality is just not as good as SVCD, but there are plenty of people here who love it.

-- Jason Shumate (Jason.Shumate@sita.int), January 09, 2001.

The main culprit, VCD-wise with ULVS4, is the built-in Ligos MPEG-1 encoder, which creates less-than optimum MPEG results that you see as "under water quality" later. The idea here is to create your AVI using your original capture codecs and use a better s/w encoder to create your White Book MPEG files using those AVIs for source. Panasonic MPEG-1 encoder 2.5 or TMPGenc 12b produce quality limited only by that of the original source video and ultimately by the specs of MPEG-1 itself. Lastly, unless your PC is top notch (933MHz, 256MB, etc.) avoid capturing using MPEG.

-- MT (turk690@yahoo.com), January 09, 2001.

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