I am trying to make SVCD backups of my vacation movies.

I have a ATI Radeon 64MB and am using ULead Videostudio 5.0 and Pinnacle Studio 7 for editing. I also use VirtualDub (capture, filter) and Tmpgenc (encoding).

As I need to do quite soem editing on these files, I need a workeable format to do this in.

Havin started with captures in AVI (uncompressed mode) I get rather poor results in the final SVCD. Probably this is due to the fact that I can only capture at 352x576 with my ATI card in AVI format.

Qustions:

- does anybody know a way of capturing in a better format with the ATIcard (Pal) ?

- Would capteringin MPEG2 leave me with the possibility to edit the same way I would with AVI files? And wouldthe result be better?

Thanks

Kris

-- Kris Vandenb (kvandenb@skynet.be), October 22, 2001

Answers

Your poor results probably are due to the fact that you can only capture 352x576 in AVI format. The resolution you can capture at depends on the ATI drivers for the card. I have an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon card. Under MMC 7.0 (the ATI capturing software) it would only capture at 320x280 NTSC AVI. Under MMC 7.1, AVI captures up to 720x480 NTSC are possible. Virtual Dub can access whatever resolutions your ATI card supports, so if you can't go beyond 352x576, you'll have to hope that ATI will make a new driver that supports higher resolution capture for your card. It is possible to edit MPEG-2 video. The best tool I have seen for this is the MPEG2VCR product from Womble (www.womble.com). It costs $249 US, but it is a frame accurate MPEG-1/2 editor. I think that they make a MPEG-1 only version that is about $50 US. It can't be beat. Would the result be better? Well, it would be a lot less trouble to just record directly to MPEG-2 video and take a lot less time. I can not say definitively as I don't record AVI video and convert, I record directly to MPEG-2 for SVCD, but based on things I've seen I think you can get at least marginally better quality by recording to high quality AVI and encoding to MPEG-2. If you can't get better AVI resolutions than 352x576, I think you would in that case be better off to record directly to MPEG-2 with your card. Be prepared to have to demux/remux your video to get it in SVCD compliant format. ATI does not have a SVCD template. There is a really good SVCD forum at network54.com/Hide/Forum/70438 that you might be interested in. The web sites www.pcphotovideo.com and members.home.net/richa have some ATI information about making SVCDs that might be of interest to you.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), October 23, 2001.