I have used Windows movie maker for capturing video but i have found two problems in it. First it only saves in wmv format and secondly it doesn't allow me to save in 640 x 480 frame size. After capturing i am using Nero Burner to burner a vcd but it takes appx 3 hours to burn a VCD of one hour.

Can anybody suggest me a better software for video capture or a better VCD write than Nero

-- Imran (igmustafa@hotmail.com), April 21, 2004

Answers

Virtualdub will capture video, but I've never used it to do so. I'm not sure if TMPGEnc can capture, but that would be the program you'd use to make a VCD compliant file.

-- Bryan (gryps-innocens@gryphon.zzn.com), April 21, 2004.

Cyberlink (http://www.gocyberlink.com) has Power VCR which you could try. I would recommend trying the demo before you buy it to be sure it meets your needs. You don't state what your capture card is, but usually they come with capturing software. You do understand that 640x480 is invalid for VCD, don't you? Unless you are doing that deliberately so you can re-encode it down to VCD resolutions, you could just capture directly at 352x240 (NTSC) or 352x288 (PAL) for VCD.

There's nothing wrong with Nero. It is taking 3 hours because Nero is re-encoding your video to meet VCD standards. TMPGenc (http://www.tmpgenc.net) is a little quicker to re-encode, or you could simply capture MPEG-1 video at the right resolution for VCD with something like Power VCR and not have to re-encode it, which will save you a lot of time.

-- Root (root@yahoo.moc), April 22, 2004.

Imran,

I made the best experience with Adobe Premiere 6.5 for capturing and editing Videos. I capture the Videos from my Panasonic DV camera through a Firewire interface. It is saved by Adobe Premiere in .avi format with a resolution of 720x576. This resulution produces very bright and sharp pictures. The problem is only that this format cannot be sticked to after coding it to VCD format. I use also Nero 6, one of the mightiest tools for creating VCDs and DVDs. but after coding, the resolution is 352x288 (PAL). This is the only resulution a VCD understands. The VCD coding results in a non-avoidable loss of quality.

But Adobe Premiere has a big advantage against other programs as e.g. Power VCR II Ver 3.0, also in my posession. With Adobe Premiere the videos will be edited (cut out of unwanted scenes like filming the ground when it has been forgotten to switch of the camera) in .avi format. That results in very smooth transitions at the spot where unwanted scenes have been cut out. The procedure of editing a Video with Adobe Premiere is very comfortable and simple.

Power VCR II V3.0 cuts the already coded video. There the transition is sometimes very rough (a black screen appears for a short wile or there are some other visual and audio problems).

But using Adobe Premiere requires a large hard disk. 1 hour of captured .avi Video requires about 20 GB hard disk space. Another approximately 20 GB is required for saving an edited 1 hour .avi file. So the hard disk must be large.

I work with a Toshiba Satellite Centrino Notebook SA30-904. That provides 80 GB hard disk that I divided with Partition Magic 8.0 into 20 GB for disk C, my normal working disk and 60 GB for disk E for Video applications. That is just sufficient. In addition I run through the USB2 port an external hard disk of 60 GB capacity. But there it is very essential that the USB is USB2 and in addition the disk interface is really capable to serve USB2. Not all what is called and sold as USB2 interfaces work really on USDB2 speed. It is better to try that before purchasing the external hard disk.

But finally to give you an impression about the quality I calculated the compression of a VCD and a DVD disk created from the same .avi source. Here are the figures:

The length of the captured .avi file was 7.5 GB
The length of the coded VCD was 300 MB only, compression 25.4
The length of the coded DVD was 1.3 GB, compression only 5.7

A comparison of the results on a full TFT screen and also on a normal color monitor showed the quality of the VCD just reasonable. The quality of the DVD coded from the same .avi source was very high, like studio quality.

The problem of the VCD is the limited space on a normal CD. Therefore the compression must be high and that reduces the quality appreciably. But this is not a problem of the coding programs like Nero that is at this time one of the best in the market, that is the VCD format itself that causes these quality reduction. The quality approach of VCD is (as published) a little bit worse than VHS and that cannot be approved by coding tricks. If you want something better you must go to DVD that provides Studio Quality when your .avi source allows that.

With regards
Siegfried

-- Siegfried Kaelbert (siegfried@saudi.net.sa), April 25, 2004.

The KVCD template will give you better quality and more time on the same limited cd-r when you record it.

You will be able to get full length movies on your regular CD-R using the template. Load the template into tmpgenc and then your movie file

let it work and then burn the resulting file using NERO yet select "non compliant" when burning the file as vcd.

You will love the results I use it all the time.

-- todd (tandyymanx@sbcglobal.net), December 17, 2004.