Video CD's
 

Hello All,
Could anyone please explain to me how I can get TOAST or some other video compression application to NOT compress the files so much for a VCD. I work on music videos. Therefore, the finished files are usually about 3 minutes long (or a gig and 1/2 using DV.) Toast always squeezes the footage down to somewhere around 50 MB. The blank CD holds 700MB. A lot of wasted space and compression. The CD always look like 4th generation VHS copies. What gets me is that I keep reading everywhere that VCD's have the same quality as VHS. If I could somehow only compress down to 500 MB's or so, the picture quality would probably be at least acceptable.
Can anyone help?
Thanks in advance!
Linwood B.
lbmaestro@yahoo.com

How are you creating the MPEG 1 streams? You may want to look at using Quicktime to create the MPEG stream and just use Toast to burn the CD. If you're after very high quality, Cleaner is the best for software encoding.

Jeff

I've battled this same gremlin myself......here's the scoop as I know.....

Toast creates mpeg-1 files for VCD using a set compression rate- if you have QT Pro- you can also open any video file and just "export" out to "Toast Video CD"- this results in a file that Toast can burn directly to CD without having to convert (Toast converts alot of video types right in the interface- with options to NTSC and PAL as well as crop)....

..here's the problem- the compression QT & Toast use produce low quality video- they're great for screen viewing and actually produce smaller files than the Sorenson Codec (and the mpegs are usually 30fps!!)....the pc crowd has discovered that most newer DVD players can be tricked into playing DVD quality video on regular cd's by using a SVCD format (Super Video CD)- which holds only 25 minutes of video but near the quality of DVD's....unfortunately there's no EZ way to do this on the Mac- you can use Virtual PC and a prog called TMPeng VCD creator (something like that) but encoding will be slow and can be problematic- if you're serious about creating SVCD's you're probably better off buying an inexpensive pc and using it to create these SVCD's.......I've seen a SVCD and it's amazing just how clear and DVD-like they are- and imagine being able to distribute your music video to near DVD quality on cheap cd-r's.....

Knowing how the Mac market defines the standard of desktop video- it's a bit sad to know there's no readily available software out there that can create a SVCD- for now you'll have to deal with bin, cue and other file types using a pc to create a SVCD- good luck....the pc crowd has us beat on this one!

OK, here is a link to my Public Folder on my iDisc at Mac.com http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.woa/wa/default?user=jtdonald&templatefn=FileSharing5.html&xmlfn=TKDocument.5.xml&sitefn=RootSite.xml&aff=co nsumer&cty=US&lang=en Click on the Red Arrow and down load the file titled Make VCD on the Mac, Follow the PDF read me and you should be set. This should produce VHS quality VCD's for you. Oh, you have to run these in OS 9.x.x the don't run in OS X. For near DVD quality it requires Cleaner and some other software. I've a tutorial on it somewhere and I'll try to find it and post it for you. I've used about 10 or 12 times and have been pleased with the quality.

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I am using TMpeg VCD to convert video files into vcd format files.
The quality is better than most of the programme I've used, but its still not as good as VHS.

May I know what setting you use in TMpeg?

One more question is, I am using Easy CD creator 5 to burn files into vcd , it does not have the svcd option.
I know we can't just copy the svcd files directly to the disc, and need to have a programme to copy them into an appropriate format so that it can be playable on svcd machine. Any programme which I can download for free?

I just went to Version Tracker http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ and downloaded VCD builder 1.0 It works in OS X and does a very nice job with VCD and SVCD. It's Freeware so go ahead and try it out. It does not create MPG files. So you'll still need QT or Cleaner.

Jeff

Michael try out the ones mentioned in the reviews at Version Tracker and do a search there for the titles.

Jeff

Erm.. Actually I am using the PC.
Any programme to recommend for the PC?
Thanks for the link though.

There are a lot of encoders for the PC. There is even a free mpeg1
and mpeg2 encoder available called bbMPEG. For the best quality
I would recommend either TMPGEnc or Cinemacraft Encoder. They
are both very expensive though. Other than that Ligos LSX is
pretty good.

bbMPEG is only available for flask or Premier. Get the premier
plugin here: http://home.concepts.nl/~hzon00008/bin/bbmpg12418.zip