Making SVCD from camcorder-footage

[Spielberg]

I have lots of camcorder-footage (Hi8) and I want to take the highlights and make nice SVCDs of it. I figure the SVCD-resolution (480*576) is enough for Hi8-material.

The process I follow is the following:
- Capture footage
- Use VirtualDub to apply some filters
- Use Premiere to do the editing
- Export to MPG2 from Premiere (with the Ligos plugin).

Now my questions:

1. What is a better approach:
- capture Matrox MJPEG 704*576 and resize to 480*576 or
- capture YUY2 480*576
- something else ? (I can't do YUY2 704*576 on my machine)

2. When I apply the VirtualDub-filters I have to save the result in an AVI-file that can be imported into Premiere 5.1c. What is the best codec to use?
- I have tried HuffYuv, but Premiere can't read this (I have tried both YUY2 and RGB output).
- PICVideo MJPEG at maximum quality is an option, but I have read that MJPEG should be avoided if possible when MPEG is your final goal.
- Raw RGB is also an option, but the files are so huge that I would like to avoid this.
- Is there a codec that takes no more than about 10 MB/sec and introduces minimal noise?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Spielberg

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[KevinG]

I am also looking for the same type of information for the same type of setup.

I have tried the YUV2 method using Huffyuv compression. No matter what I choose for import/export frame types (upper/lower fields), the resulting SVCD looks very bad when played on a Pioneer 525.

Here are my steps:
1) captured 352x480 (NTSC) using the Huffyuv codec for YUV2.
2) Import clip into Premiere 5.1c
3) Checked that clip is not "deinterlaced/flicker remove/swapped fields" under video/frame settings of clip.
4) exported using LSX plugin as 352x480 MPEG2, cbr under 2300, motion set to "slowest" (20), no cropping, no filtering and no deinterlaced with lower field first.

This results in a SVCD that has horrible horizontal lines in it when played on Pioneer 525 DVD player. I have played around with the upper field first, but it did not help.

I have also burned both types of samples from http://www.stanford.edu/~jkratz/svcd_tutorial.htm (interlaced and non-interlaced). My SVCDs come out like the interlaced one but even worse. There are way too many horizontal lines in my videos.

Can anyone shed some light on this process?
Is there anyone else of there that is doing the same process as Spielberg and I are doing but with success?

I must have read EVERY forum posting, here and everywhere else including the pirate sites, and web page out there including rec.desktop.video over the past 6 months and I am still confused.

If I do not get this to work, I will be forced to buy a DVD-R writer with hopes I will be awarded it after my wife divorces for spending way too much time on the computer.

Maybe I need another hobby.

Kevin
(Long time lurker, first time poster)

[Spielberg]

Kevin,

If I understand you correctly, you are able to import HuffYuv-coded AVI's in Premiere 5.1c? Which version of HuffYuv do you use and what settings (RGB or YUV output?).
If I import HuffYuv-coded AVI's in Premiere, I get only garbage.

Another thing: you create 352*480 MPEG2 files. I thought the 'official' SVCD resolution was 480*480 (NTSC). Why do you use 'only' 352*480?

Spielberg

[cjyo~]

I don't have a complete answer for you, but a thought has occured to me...It may be a bit roundabout though...

I had my student film professionally encoded from DigiBeta to Mpeg2 (at near Max Bits 9m/s). I haven't been able to make a DVD (or MiniDVD etc), so I tried to make an SVCD. I followed the SVCD tutorials that are floating around.

At first I tried Flask to make an XVCD, but that resulted in skipping and extra interlace flashes that were not in the original source (though single frame picture quality was good).

What worked for me was transcoding/resizing 720x480 to 480x480 in ReMpeg (http://perso.libertysurf.fr/nvorip/rippers_rip.htm) at 25% of the original bit rate (about 2100 mb/s). This resulted in pretty good picture quality (slight compression artifacts can be seen around high contrast edges and on quick cuts). The resulting disc muxed with I-Author plays perfectly in my APEX and video plays well in a Philips DVD player (don't know the model).

Sorry to be long winded, by my idea is for you to capture MJPEG (best quality on my computer), then transcode at full rez 720x480 to mpeg-2 at a high bit rate with Ligos (or your favorite encoder), then finally transcode/resize to 480x480, 2100 mb/s in ReMpeg.

I know this adds an extra step of compression, but it may actually work better than what you're doing now.

A side note: I made a subtitle version of my film in Premier by transcoding from the original 9 mb/s mpeg-2 to the PIC Video mjpeg with low compression(since Premiere can't import mpeg-2). I rendered the finally movie in Matrox MJPEG and it looked pretty good. My point is that the PIC Video codec is very good quality for editing in Premiere and actually held up better than the Matrox codec (which was much softer).

More garbage for you: These are notes from Ligos Mpeg2 encoding (my suggestion for your first step above), which gave me good results:

Video Source: 720x480 24fps mp2
ripped to 23.976 PICVideo mjpeg
edited in premiere in a 29.97 full frame project
with 48khz stereo wav sound

LSX-MPEG 3.0 Encoding Settings:
(based on Recommended NTSC full frame default settings)

mpeg-2, 720x480, 29.97
encode audio (checked)
VBR Settings:
max bitrate: 9000 kbits/s
optimized quantization scale:2
Avg bit rate max: 6000 kb/s
Avg bit rate min: 3000 kb/s
No filtering
No Deinterlace
No Detect Inverse telecine
performance: normal speed
sync: keep original duration
sequence: I BB P BB P BB I ...
P:3
B:2
Motion vectors:
P:40h/32v
B:24h/24v
Main Profile and Main Level
NTSC
Aspect ratio:2 (4:3)
Fixed bitrate (unchecked)
special:normal mode
audio: mpeg-layer 2:
Stereo
audio data rate: 224 kbit/s
*Headers: only first GOP closed
Put Sequence Headers before every GOP
Files: don't delete originals - to keep seperate audio/video streams


Audio Source:
Sound Forge 4.5
resample: 44khz wav to 48khz (anti-alias ON), 16bit, stereo .wav file

SoftEncode 1.0 settings:
Data Rate: 224kbps
Sample rate: 48khz (auto)
Audio coding mode: 2/0 (L,R)
Bit stream mode: main audio service: Music and Effects
Dialog normalization: -27db
Audio Bandwidth: 20.30 kHz
DO NOT: Save frames in Intel byte order (unchecked)
Dolby surround mode: NOT Dolby Surround encoded
Original bit stream (checked)
Audio Production info: (exists)
Mix Level 105 db SPL
Room: Small, flat
Digital deemphasis (checked)
DC high-pass filter (unchecked)
Bandwidth low-pass filter (checked)
Film:Standard
RF overmodulation protection (checked)
Time code (no - unchecked)

Streamweaver Multiplex 5.4
default NTSC video (VOB and ifo)

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Please visit http://spincycle.n3.net - My System: Celeron 300a(@450/2v),Abit BH6, 128mb RAM, Win98SE, Marvel G200TV, Diamond MX300, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 20g system drive, DiamondMax Plus 40 capture drive, IBM 8g Deskstar program drive, Adaptec 2940UW SCSI, 9gb Barracuda UWSCSI video drive, Hitachi GD-2500 DVD-Rom, UltraPlex CD-Rom, Plexwriter CD-recorder, Viewsonic PT775, Soundworks 4.1 speakers

[This message has been edited by cjyo~ (edited 08 June 2000).]

[This message has been edited by cjyo~ (edited 08 June 2000).]

[KevinG]

Spielberg,

>> Why do you use 'only' 352*480?
I am able to choose yuv2 (dll hack) and capture at 352x480. 480x480 is not an option in the Matrox driver. Also, the help file for Phillips SVCD Designer states this;

Resolution
For PAL assets, this can be 480x576, 352x576 or 352x288.
For NTSC assets, this can be 480x480, 352x480 or 352x240.

I did not want to resize as I keep hearing that this would degrade quality. In the compression pulldown, I choose Huffyuv (version 1.2.2) and I think I set it for RGB.
(I am very confused right now with what I had actually picked.) I was having major color problems (Huffyuv 1.2.3 corrects this although I did not use it). Somehow, the colors are ok now without this 1.2.3 version.

>> If I import HuffYuv-coded AVI's in Premiere, I get only garbage

Have you tried the latest version. Now at 1.3.

This WAS a hot topic not too long ago but since the unknown 'holiday' that the regulars are celebrating, it seems to have been forgotten.
I am going to try to make time this weekend to redo all my steps with the latest versions of Huffyuv and AVI_IO.

About my interlacing problems. I just hope there is not a bug in the Matrox YUV or RGB capture like would I have read at http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-an...?msg_id=003GkX

If this is the case, I guess MJPEG would have to be the way to do this.

ciyo~,
Thanks for the great info. I am trying to reduce the turn-around time to make SVCD and/or VCD. I am looking for a solution using just AVI_IO, Huffyuv, Premiere and a plugin encoder for MPEG 1/2.

[Biker]

Guys its embarrasing to ask this - but whats SVCD ?

Thanks

Biker

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[dchip]

Heres a definition I got from: http://www.vcdhelper.com/

"SVCD stands for Super Video CD. A SVCD is like a VCD but the video are stored in MPEG-2 Variabel Bitrate(optional) with a max bitrate of 2600 kbit/s. Therefore a CD can contain from 35 to 74 minutes video. The video are also stored in higher resolution, 480x480 for NTSC and 480x576 for PAL. All CD-players can play SVCD and many standalone DVD-Players."

I don't work with SVCD but if you are trying to do something with it, take a look at this link. Very good resource Doc Mordrid posted a few weeks back. http://www.vcdhelper.com/

[BMV]

I originally posted this on 5-10-00 to www.nerd-out.com/apex, a great forum for SVCD/VCD related stuff. This also applies to MJPEG at 352x480, and 704x480. Officially SVCD is 480x480 ntsc, etc., but SVCDs made with 352x480, 720x480 and 704x480 will work too, with the same bitrate of 2600kbs max.

"This will be a long message, so bear with me! I just bought a Sony TRV8 miniDV camcorder a week ago, and I've just made a test SVCD from the DV footage I captured with my firewire card. I say it's a test SVCD, because I used various encoding options with Media Studio Pro 6, Premiere 5.1c with the Ligos LSX plugin, LSX standalone encoder, and Vitual Dub with BBMPEG. I took the same clip, and did the following.

First off, the BBMPEG with Virtualdub produced okay quality(not the best), but took way too long to do. I've completely given up on BBMPEG for the time being.

1) Converted the DV footage directly to 480X480 SVCD with Premiere, variable video bitrate max of 2400 average 2200, and audio 192k using the lower frame first option. **This turned out incredibly close to the original DV footage. I'll always do it this way from now on**

2) Converted the DV footage directly to 480X480 SVCD with Premiere, variable video bitrate max of 2400 average 2200, and audio 192k using the upper frame first field/frame option. This looked okay on the computer, but had a strobe like effect when played in my APEX DVD player. That's no surprise, since everything I've read says that if you're encoding using the field option instead of frame, you should always use the lower field first option.

3) Converted the DV footage directly to 480X480 using MSP6 with field order b(lower field first), with constant video bitrate of 2400(ulead can't do variable bitrate with the ligos exporter ) 192k audio. RESULTS: The file size was only slightly higher than Premiere, but the quality wasn't as good, choppier playback, and
more artifacts.

4) Converted the DV footage directly to 480X480 using MSP6 with field order a(upper field first), with constant video bitrate of 2400(ulead can't do variable bitrate with the ligos exporter ) 192k audio. RESULTS: Again, strobe like effect. Definitely SHOULDN'T use field order a(upper field first).

5) Converted DV footage to Indeo 5.11 480X480, and encoded to SVCD format using Standalone LSX encoder. RESULTS: Playback was smooth and picture was artifact-free, although a bit fuzzy. Not as good as Premiere at it's best though.

6) I used ULEAD MSP6 to convert the DV footage to MPEG-2, without changing the resolution(720x480) at 2400kbs. The resulting MPEG-2 video looked VERY blocky, the absolute worst of all the methods I tried. I was HIGHLY dissapointed, since others claim using 720x480 yields slightly high video quality.

CONCLUSION: Encoding using LSX plugin for Premiere results in an almost perfect copy of the DV(MJPEG) original. Leaving the resolution at 720x480(704x480 for MJPEG) looks good, but 480x480 looks slightly better, and it takes just as lone to encode. I was shocked, especially since it's so much faster than every other method I've tried! The key is not de-interlacing the video, and using field order b (lower field first) encoding with variable video bitrate max of 2400 average 2200, and audio 192k, and motion estimation at at least 14(I use 20)

[Spielberg]

Kevin, thanks for mentioning that HuffYuv is at version 1.3 now. I tested it and it solved both my problems!

Due to the performance improvements I can capture HuffYuv at 704*576 without any dropped frames now! That's really great.
I can also import the HuffYuv files in Premiere now and encode them into MPEG2!
This means I can work with uncompressed video all the way and as a final step encode the MPEG2 file. In theory this should give me the maximum achievable quality. I'll do some tests to see if theory and practice match ...

Kevin, if you want to capture directly 480*480 (or 480*576) you should use VirtualDub, which allows you to specify custom capture sizes. This works fine in combination with the YUY2 hack.

Cjyo~, thanks for your suggestion of using MPEG2 and use ReMpeg. I will try it.

BMV, could it be that using the lower field first is specific for DV-input? I used analog input (Hi8) and upper field first seems to look better for me.
Another thing is the de-interlacing part; I use the smart deinterlace filter in VirtualDub and this seems to improve the quality as far as I can judge, even if I encode to MPEG using the field option.

Spielberg