Hi! I'm new to this VCD making and have tried to burn one movie from my video camera. The output I watched on TV is really not acceptable, colors bleeding, boxiness and I cannot recognize the faces when the subject is not zoomed in.

I have a digital video cam connected to 1394 firewire PCI card (western digital) thru I.Link. I'm capturing/editing (AVI format) using Media Studio Pro 6.0 and using NERO for burning. When capturing, I can't seem to set any video/audio options. Can someone tell me how to do this or can someone recommend a better Capture Software? Because when I tried to play the AVI on my PC in full screen, the video already has a little bit boxiness. Is this normal?

After editing, I create the final video using the same software set to VCD NTSC format. But, as I said, this resulted in very poor quality video. Please help!!! Thanks.

-- Jonathan (boyt_jbl@hotmail.com), November 17, 2001

Answers

I'm not familiar with your card, but what codec are you using when recording AVI? You should use either Huffy or MJPEG. Most of the other codecs are lossy and your poor quality video could be a result of poor AVI going in - you know, garbage in, garbage out. I record directly to MPEG-1/2 for a variety of reasons and I have very little practical AVI recording experience, but I would start by checking the codec. Your AVI video should not be blocky and I suspect that this is a result of using the wrong codec. Media Studio Pro might default to some less than desirable codec to save disk space, but I'm really just guessing here. Maybe somebody else can give you some more info, but maybe this will help you to get started.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), November 19, 2001.

Thanks Jason! My card is just a firewire PCI card from Western Digital. I'm not sure about the codec. Can you tell me how to see what Media Studio Pro is using and how do I change it (where can I get a better one)?

-- Jonathan (boyt_jbl@hotmail.com), November 19, 2001.

Sorry, I have never used Media Studio Pro, so I have no idea how to check what codec it might be using. You might try posting a question to the SVCD forum at network54.com/Hide/Forum/70438. There are a few people there who use Media Studio Pro and they might be able to help you.

-- Jason (Jason.Shumate@equant.com), November 20, 2001.

Hi. I am new to this board but have some experiance with ulead MSP. In Ulead Video Editor select File->Create->Video File and choose avi as file format. Click Options and select the tab Compression. In the pull down you can select the codec you wish.

Good luck.

-- Robert van der Woude (r.vanderwoude5@chello.nl), November 21, 2001.

I use Media Studio Pro6, which can do many things Premiere 6 can't and can't do a few the other can. Anyway, the DV AVI codec/format is fixed (720x480, 29.97fps). This means when capturing you cannot, and are not allowed to set options for resolution or frame rate; the only changeable thing is the audio sampling rate, but that is already dictated by what is recorded on tape, and only moves on to your HDD unaltered to be type-1 DV AVI files there later on. Video Capture in MSPro is not unique to this; all other capture applications meant for 1394 device control to move DV data onto your HDD from the camcorder (or any suitably equipped 1394 playback device) behave the same way. DV was created with, among others, a view for consumers like us to enjoy benefits of editing and tweaking and playing with digital video and is one of the best there is video codecs for amateurs like U or me. You already more or less have a good setup, and anything else whould be one step down the rung. If in the DV AVI format it played back poorly on your PC (with Windows Media Player, no?) this cannot be the fault of MSPro or the capture but of the way the tape was shot with the camcorder or perhaps something IS wrong with the camcorder. Note that in 1394 "capture" is a misnomer here because the data is already on the camcorder tape and you're merely moving it onto the HDD, unlike with an analogue camcorder where digitizing is done as the video moves into the analogue input capture card. If there is boxiness on your DV AVI files it's because that was the data on the tape to begin with. If you mean the boxiness is after you've encoded it to MPEG for your VCD, then okay, it's MSPro at fault. MsPro6 uses Ligos LSX 3.0 plug-in as MPEG decoding engine. If you choose to render to an MPEG file and choose this template this LSX is what goes to work, with unfortunately unwatchable results. One way I get around this is to render the timeline contents back to a type-1 DV AVI file (you can create up to a 4GB size file or 18mins max program length), and then encode that with TMPGenc2.0 for much, much better results. Failing this you should get Premiere/AVIsynth combo, the details of which you can start with from www.geocities.com/aussie01au :) :)

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), November 21, 2001.