Just upgraded to mini dv from hi 8 i 've been making svcd with my hi8 for a few years and after lots of testing with different settings and tweaks came up with a lovely template for making great video - clear,crisp,no blocks or noise - all nice and smooth.
The digital revolution got hold of me and i new i just had to get one - set myself up with firewire card dvin/out camera and mediastudio pro and studio 7(left over from analogue capture)capture,edit then back out to dv tape - absolutely brilliant, all in sync no dropped frames, no freezing or crashing (why didn't i do this earlier) finally for the disc of god and whoa!!
fuzzy, block noise but good resolution anyone have any ideas or a good template for tmp/enc for svcd i've been at it weeks testing different settings and like i said i'm no novice with tmpeng but this one has got me. hopefully some of you lovelly people will be able to help as i'm stumped

The main reason is that miniDV is much more detailed and crisp and when you encode it to SVCD you need a higher bitrate to reproduce all the details and crispness. When the bitrate is not enough you get blockiness and artifacts. MiniDV is very hard to compress at good quality at SVCD bitrates.

One thing you can try is a lower resolution. If tou use 352 pixels width instead of 480 pixels you get less details to compress and you'll get less compression artifacts at a given bitrate but the picture is also less detailed. The alternative is to try XSVCD, a non-standard SVCD with higher bitrates than allowed for SVCD. Then you may get playback problems if your player can't handle the higher bitrates.

You may also want to try another encoder, like Canopus Procoder. This encoder give better results at SVCD bitrates than TMPGEnc. But for the price of Procoder you can get a DVD-burner and then you can get good results with TMPGEnc also because DVD allows higher bitrates. For best results use Canopus Procoder and a DVD burner.

There are some tricks you can try. The program FitCD can be used to resize the picture to a smaller picture with black borders around it to still be within SVCD resolution. If you keep the border to 16 pixels you won't see it on the TV because that part of the border is hidden outside the edges of the screen (TV overscan area).

With avisynth or virtualdub you can filter out some of the video noise and then get a better SVCD. I recommend the Convolution3D filter in avisynth. Check out the avisynth forum on http:/forum.doom9.net

You can also try the internal noise filter in TMPGEnc. I'm not familiar with it but what I have heard it is very good but also very slow. You can play with the soften block noise settings to make the blockiness less visible. And you may also want to try playing around with the quantizer matrices. If you still get blocky results you may need to deinterlace your video. You will then save bitrate but loose smooth playback on TV. It may very well be worth it if you player can't play XSVCD bitrates. There is an avisynth filter called TomsMoComp that give excellent results.

I also recommend the software DynaPel Steadyhand if you have a hand held camera. This software can make wonders to remove the shakiness from the video. But it also have some problems to get smooth in motion and the output is a little bit more noisy than the original. So I recommend noise filtering after the use of Steadyhand. It's often more pleasant to get rid of some of the shakiness and it also improves compressibility a bit.

Good Luck!

Ronny

cheers ronny, a very detailed answer that will keep me busy for a while - nice to know there are people out there willing to help

i think it all has to do with compression of your source AVI file
DV AVI has probably a higher level of compression compared to the AVi files obtained with analogue capture

I noticed the same with my ATI AIW card when using AVI Hufy compression compared to DV- AVI from camcorder

Hi agboy,

Can you describe your process from Hi8 to SVCD. I'm trying to do that but did'nt achieved an acceptable quality till now.

Thanks a lot.

Hi,

Different technigue > different quality. Simple as this

DV8 ---> PC is one of my goals and MiniDV --->SVCD is about same?
I'm not quite satisfied of those fancy programs that can capture DV1 or DV2. I prefer S-video analog capture to them. DV capture is interlaced vs. using right codec, like MJPEG, you can virtualdub-capture fullscreen progressive.

Found just Mainconcept standalone Mpeg 1.1 encoder that is really fast with 'uncompressed' avi. Go buy it ! 149$ or for pm6.5 users 49$

If you can move to minidvd or better yet full dvd, you will find all these issues disappear. I finally bailed on svcd when I tried to use dv video source and found what you found - worse quality not better in svcd.

Mostly it's because DV source is already compressed, and although its not visible to most people's eyes in the source the mpeg encoder does notice - and it produces artifacts at low bitrates.

I'm now going to dvd, and at half frame/6mbs vbr or full frame 8mb/s vbr it is perfect.

well bugger me, i've just spent a fortune setting myself up with digital only to find i can get better results with hi 8 unless i spend another fortune and go dvdr. sods law i suppose, ah well these things are sent to try us.
as for how i made hi 8 into svcd it was thus - capture at 352/288 but at max bitrate simply encode using tmpgenc keeping 352/288 / 2520kbit / high quality motion search - did not need any filters and i know some will say bigger resolution is needed but i found artifacts everywhere at full resolution even capturing at full and cropping to 352 gave artifacts added bonus of slow motion was nice and smooth at 352.

Agboy,

Which card to you use, and capture software?
Do you capture AVI (which codec)
or MPEG2 real time (as ATI MMC)?

Thanks for more informations.

i used dc10+ but used picvideo codec because pinnacle codec will not let you open a rendered avi in any other program (crafty so and so's)

sorry, forgot,
captured avi - dc10 is a mjpeg capture card