Some newbie questions

[Michael Chen]

I am new to DV, and definitely new to xl1s.
I got a couple of more questions but i'll ask them bit by bit :)
Do not want to get too confuse with too many infos.

1) When i put the video mode in 16 x 9 mode, how do i make the black bars appear? When i transferred the video to computer, the black bar is not there. So what does that mode do?

2) I did a short film with my friend's camera a couple of weeks ago. Everything is fine, but when i convert the video format to vcd mpg format, the video quality has been adversely affected. I need to transfer the video to vcd format so that my friends can watch them on tv, so how do I prevent the video from the adverse effect?

thanks for helping !

p/s : I've posted this under a diff topic actually . Guess it wasnt that appropriate so i post this under a different heading again hope that you guys wont mind. Sorry.

[Chris Hurd]

Howdy from Texas,

Re: Question 1. In 16x9 mode, there are no black bars involved. It's designed for playback on a widescreen 16x9 television, so that it fills the screen completely from edge to edge. It sounds like what you really want to do is view the 16x9 video on a normal, plain-jane television . For that, you'll have to use an editing program to squash the image from top to bottom and add your own black "letterbox" matte bars. You can do this on a Mac with Final Cut Pro or on a PC with Adobe Premiere, Canopus Edit or any number of other programs. There is one Sony DV deck, the DSR30, which will do this for you automatically, but it's a $3,000 machine.

Re: Question 2. The VCD MPEG format is optimized for a small 324x240 window on a computer. It's not ever going to look good on a television. Your best bet is to edit and make a final master copy in the DV format, and make a VHS dub from that from playing back in a normal VCR. The VCD Mpeg that you made is good for putting on a CD or watching on a computer screen, but not for television. Hope this helps,

[Bill Ravens]

Question2: Alternately, I would suggest using SVCD format or DivX5. Both formats will give EXCELLENT 720x480 video at bitrates better than 3000Kb/sec.

[ja135321]

use mpeg2 in dvd format and you wont lose a thing. well you'll lose a little but not much difference.

[Chris Hurd]

Quality in MPEG2 depends entirely on the bitrate used in the encoding process. I've seen some incredibly ugly compression. It varies widely.

[Rob Lohman]

Mpeg compression will generaly look bad... unless done good.
Even VCD can look incredibly good (very hard to do) or can look
pretty nice (not so hard) or bad (common). The main aspect
in producing a good mpeg is the program you use to encode it
with and the time that program has available (mostly determined
through the parameters you set).

SVCD is for NTSC 480 x 480 and for PAL 480 x 576.
MPEG2 for DVD is full resolution pal or NTSC.

You can easily produce a very bad looking SVCD or DVD
stream, as I said, it all depends on your program and the
input stream.

[Michael Chen]

I see.
But then if i put them in svcd format, I couldn't use my prog ( adaptec easy cd creator ) to put them into vcd format.

It'll say that the format is not a vcd format :(

Most of my friends only have a normal vcd player. They do not have the dvd player, and i do not have a dvd writer to put them into dvds either.

So is there any other way if i wanna convert them so that my friends could view them in better quality from vcd? any prog recomended etc?

ie, how do i make them to look as good as those original vcd?

[Rob Lohman]

If you want some good (and expensive) mpeg encoders
take a look at:

www.cinemacraft.com & www.tmpgenc.net
more on them can be found at doom9.org or apachez.net
and how to use them (including guides to vcd) or on the
first site.

Another option might be to burn it as a DiVX movie on a
data cd and include the latest divx codec. If they have
computers they can play this (windows pc's that is).

SVCD can usually only be played on a DVD player (not even
all) and must be burned with a SVCD aware burn application
like Nero.

In your case better to stick with the Divx or VCD approach.
Try those programs out

[Michael Chen]

I see. I was wondering, some film company releases home videos in vcd and they shot in dv format.

Does they compresses their movies with softwares? or does them do it with hardware?

lets say if one were to form a company and produce films for broadcast, we can't distribute them in computer formats rite?
I heard that some of us here does some shoots for wedding. What format did you output the video to?
Not many people have dvd in my countries yet :(

[Chris Hurd]

Howdy from Texas,

Here in the United States, the majority of all wedding video work is delivered to the customer on the VHS tape format, although DVD is becoming more and more popular all the time.

The problem with computer video formats is that there is such a variety of operating systems, encoding methods, and playback software that there is no one single standard.

Although you can cover pretty much the majority of computer users with Quicktime and Windows Media formats. Hope this helps,

[Rob Lohman]

Professional mpeg encoding is usually done with a combination
of hardware and software I think. They probably use hardware
for the following reasons:

- primarely for speed
- easy of use (?)
- they can implement the very best
mpeg encoders without worying
about consumers being able to use,
buy or illegaly copying them...

Just some thoughts.... These lines are blurring now-a-days
though. As I said earlier, there are some very good software
encoders out. Check the URL's I gave you earlier. If you want
the best quality possible learn about mpeg thouroghly, what
it is good at and what bad. Especially learn the program your
using inside out. Tweaking settings in mpeg encoders can
increase your quality numerous times. Mpeg encoding is still
a bit of an "advanced" thing if you want to do it right (ie, quality)

[Michael Chen]

I tried using some other encoding programmes to encode the avi file to mpeg.

The vcd format requires that the video bitrate to be set at 1150 kbits/sec. The video at this bitrate is really bad :(( So does it really matter what encoding prog i used? I tried out the encoding prog from www.tmpgenc.net. The video still look bad when the bitrate is set at 1150.
When i increase the video bitrate, the video looks better but it wont be playable by a vcd player.

I know I can just distribute them thru computer files, but normally people watch tv progs etc thru tv so I hoped that it'll be viewable using tv...

So how do you guys send your films to film festival etc? In what kind of output? Thanks again for answering.

[Bill Ravens]

Technology has evolved a lot since the MPEG1 standard was written. There is now MPEG2(SVCD or DVD) and MPEG4(DIVX or Microsoft M4). SVCD allows a variable bitrate and you can get pretty good video at >2500MBPS. DVD allows bitrates up to 9500MBPS. The latest release of DIVX v5 produces a comparable video quality qith multiple pass encoding. There are a limited number of DVD players that can play SVCD, APEX being one possible brand that will do it. I think DVD is acknoledged as one of the best compression technologies, after all, Hollywood uses it.

[Chris Hurd]

Howdy from Texas,

<< So how do you guys send your films to film festival etc? In what kind of output? >>

These entries are usually on tape... most commonly DV, VHS or Beta SP.

Again, you should consider mastering back to DV tape for the highest possible quality.