I am running on mac os 10.3.3 and using toast 5.2.1.I have 640 MB or Ram,120 GB HD space.I converted an hour long .vid file (transfered from VHS to iMovie) and it took 24 hours to convert it to MPEG form for VCD burning.is this normal?If not,what can I do to fix it?Are there other programs that will do it faster?Afer I transfer to iMovie,I export it as "CD-ROM movie",is this what I want to do?I convert to MPEG as NTSC,not PAL,is that right?

Dan33185@yahoo.com

-- Daniel Anderson (Dan33185@yahoo.com), February 02, 2005

Answers

Conversion time depends on a lot of factors: Processor speed, how fast and how fragmented the hard drive is, the efficiency of the software and how fast the computer can perform I/O to memory, how many background items the computer has to take care of, etc...

As far as what you need, I'm not familiar with Mac programs, but these are the specs you will want to use when exporting a NTSC Video CD compliant file:

MPEG-1 compression 1150 kbps video bitrate 224 kbps Audio Bitrate 44100 kHz audio sample rate MPEG-1 Layer II (.MP2) audio format 352x240 resolution 29.970 frames/second NTSC for US and Japan, PAL for Western Europe and most other areas.

You will still need an authoring program to add the proper headers to the MPEG-1 file and write the Video CD file structure.

(information from http://www.videohelp.com/vcd)

If you're making a video for computer use only, it's best and easiest to keep it in whatever scan format it was in originally (NTSC, PAL) and just leave it as an MPEG file. If you want to display this on a TV, you'll need to take into consideration what kind of television and player you are using (NTSC or PAL) and encode for that type. Note that this may result in a very poor picture because of conversion losses.

Check:

www.videohelp.com www.doom9.org www.afterdawn.com

for information on Video CD and making/playing them.

-- Bryan (gryps-innocens@gryphon.zzn.com), February 02, 2005.