MJPEG to Video CD

[smithgt]

In light of the problems with Win2k I have just installed Win98 for use with my G200.

I want to capture and output to VCD. I have nero v5, but the AVI captured by Matrox Software is not the "MJPEG-2 which was encode for Super Video CD"

Can I download or patch anything so I can simply capture and then output via Nero (or Easy CD Creator).

Thanks in advance.

[AndrewDV]

Hello,

You can find a lot of information about creating VCDs and similar at this site:

http://www.vcdhelp.com/

Simply put, you need to convert from MJPEG to a whitebook MPEG format. There is a program called TMPGEnc (http://www.tmpgenc.com/) that is highly recommended.

[Sciascia]

www.doom9.org also has a lot of guides and links to what you need to do.

[Frank Marshall]

I use a G200 (PAL) to create VCDs so here's how I do it:

1. I capture at full resolution MJPEG using PC-VCR Remote. I find capturing at full res gives better end results. You may want to use avi_io or VirtualDub to capture files longer than about 10 minutes.

2. I edit the footage in Premiere. I don't know why but I get better results using "upper field first" in my project settings. I first discovered this when comparing renders of speed adjusted footage, slow motion, and found the smoothest results to be when using the upper field first setting. BTW, Premiere and the G200 don't like each other but I'm a Premiere user from way back and it's gonna take quite an effort to move over to MSP which I do believe is better value.

3. I output the full res footage as a series of sub-2gig files, using Matrox compression on the manipulated footage and avoiding recompression on the straight video.

4. I bring the individual files into VirtualDub where I first Crop the noisy or blank video lines out using the Null Transform function, then apply the Smart Deinterlace filter and finally Resize to CIF using the highest quality setting ("Precise Bicubic" from memory) and output the files using HuffYUY compression.

When I get around to it, I'll look into how to automate the transfer of video data using avisynth.

5. Next, I bring the footage back into Premiere and encode it to MPEG-1 VCD using the Panasonic plug-in. The only tweak I make is to set Premiere's output Gamma to 1.5 (though this may be a touch strong) to beef up the colour saturation and contrast. Panasonic then goes to work to make my resulting VCD compliant file ready for burning using Nero.

TMPEG is a freeware encoder that's on a par, if not better than Panasonic but until I learn to use avisynth I'm finding it much easier to simply use Panasonic.

All the best in your efforts.