Quality vcd`s? What is the best way for makin it?

[Wiken]

Could someone tell me what todo? =))
All of my captures seems perfect, but after i have encodet them with either bbmpeg or panasonic adobe plugin, there is pretty bad blyrryness on some vids (most of them
What can i do? is there any easy way to sharpen a avi? or isnt that the problem?
please let me know what todo :P

[Jerry Jones]

I have a Broadway Pro 4.5 board by Data Translation:
http://www.b-way.com

It only does MPEG-1. The new one, version 5, does MPEG-1 & MPEG-2.

It's not cheap ($700). But it does a nice job of encoding and it's much faster than software on my slow home computer.

In a few weeks, Darim will be releasing a new board for around $500 called the "MG 100."
http://www.darvision.com/products/mg100/index.html

I'm told only demo versions of the board are available currently.

[Wiken]

So is there anyone who can give me a little help to solve that problem?
my avi`s are just perfect after capturing, but after i have encodet, some of them (mainly most of them) are pretty blyrry, especially bad if there is some text on the video. what can i do?

[Walrus]

The blurriness around text is pretty much unavoidable with VCD bitrates. Even commercial VCDs exhibit this problem. There are ways of minimizing this artifact with VCD, but no real way of getting rid of it unless you want to generate psuedo-VCD content. To minimize the artifact make things as easy as possible on the MPEG encoder. First of all, I do recommend capturing full resolution YUY2 if at all possible, deinterlace (preferably with Smart Deinterlace) and then resizing down to 352x240 (etc) using bilinear or precise bicubic filtering (judge for yourself which one looks nicer, I decided on a case by case basis). This removes a good deal of the jaggedness (aliasing) of sharp edges in the source video. Next I run a levels filter that allows me to adjust contrast/brightness issues. Next I apply a mild blurring filter that preserves sharp details (such as my 2d cleaner), and then use a temporal denoiser (such as my temporal cleaner) to remove as much grain and video noise as possible without getting ghosting artifacts. I modify these procedures on a case by case basis. Next if the image is looking too soft, use an unsharp mask filter, but use it VERY sparingly. If the sharpening is too high the video compression will come out looking horrible.
The last step is to use a good MPEG encoder. I only really recommend bbMPEG (version 1.23+) and tMPEG now. They're both free and both can be tweaked to give as good as possible VCD compression. If you can handle Variable Bitrate VCDs (which are non-standard but seem to work in a good deal of stand-alone players) then set the compression accordingly, and you should get video that looks signifigantly better than VCD at the same average bitrates.
Anyways, there's a lot of free stuff to play with and tweak, and half the fun of video processing is figuring it all out

[Jerry Jones]

By boosting your data rate and resolution above the official VCD standard, you can create either:

a) XVCD (352 x 240)
b) HVCD (702 x 480)

...and eliminate the blockiness.

My Broadway board does the XVCD at 1700+kbps
and I'm very happy with the quality.

For more on XVCD or HVCD, read this Web site page:
http://aussie01.freeservers.com/custom3.html

And feel free to visit the Ulead MediaStudio Pro Worldwide User Group (WWUG) forum:
http://www.wwug.com/forums/uleadmediastudio/index.htm

[Wiken]

hey hey, ive heard that i could change something in system.ini file for using better decompressor than matrox marvel comes with.

here is what settings ive got in my system.ini:

VIDC.dmb1=RRIcm.dll
vidc.MJPG=Pvmjpg20.dll
VIDC.YUY2=RRIcm.dll
VIDC.HFYU=huffyuv.dll
VIDC.PIMJ=pvljpg20.dll
VIDC.PVW2=pvwv220.dll

is there anything i could change in here that some of you guys could recomend for gettin better mpegs?
ill capp the avis with either mjpeg or huffyuv (and sometimes only straight to yuv2)
But it seems that the mpegs ill make from mjpeg is better then those ill make from either yuv2 or huffyuv (that seems weird, doesnt it?)

[Wiken]

Is there anyone who can answer that msg i had before this? =))

[Dr Mordrid]

The "blurring" you see around titles is an effect called Gibbs, or "squirrel", artifacting.

Gibbs artifacts are caused by the recompression of a DCT compressed video stream like MJPeg, MPEG or DV, and are particularly noticable around overlay effects or titles. Solid color fields are the most problematic.

There are a few ways to reduce them;

1. As a pre-production step capture and use uncompressed video (YUY2, HuffYUV or RGB) or low compression video (PICVideo MJPeg @ quality 20) for those segments where you will add titles or overlays. Once the overlay is added you can then render the affected clip to the settings of the remaining clips to be used in the project. This is the best technique.

2. use a medium gray or dark colored border 2-6 pixels wide around the text using the settings in the MSPro built in titler. The idea is to keep the color & brightness contrast between the edges of the border/font/overlay and the background to a minimum. This technique is frequently used in professional TV titling.

3. Don't make the font size too small relative to the capture rez.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 01 August 2000).]

[kevind224]

Another very good link on this topic.
www.vcdhelper.com


Kevin