From DV Camcorder to SVCD

[Mac Sidewinder]

How are you doing it?

Taken from previous discussion - but method remains the same....

I have been playing around with this very topic for quite some time now. I have a Sony digital camcorder and I use Studio 7 combined with DVD2SVCD and the results I get are pretty good to me. Here is my latest project, it was 58 mins of a military airshow. Lots of action (aircraft flybys) and some static panning. I use a single leg stand to help steady the shots (highly recommended).

1. Capture from camera via firewire and compose project (with transitions, titles, and special effects with studio 7.

2. Output project as avi file. Since its uncompressed, no loss. The file was 12.5 gb.

3. Using DVD2SVCD with the following options:
- Left as interlaced (otherwise motion was somewhat jerky on tv)
- Audio sample @ 192k
- Sharpness @ .60
- Tem Smooth @ 2,1 (helps with closeups of people's faces without losing background detail. Seems to help also with ringing on some objects.
- Quality @ 24
- 4 pass encode with cce v2.5 / better than tmpge for svcd (to me)
- Selected to edit the avs
- Avg processing speed was .571
- Final filesize was 799mb

Here are some observations I have:

1. The only prob I encountered with DVD2SVCD was after I edited the avs(more on this in a sec) and pressed save, then continue, CCE would hang. Never tried to write the script files at all. Tried it 3 time with same results. Finally tried recover in DVD2SVCD which resumed at the edit avs screen and then cce started normally. Last entry in log file after error would just show that the audio was completed and nothing about video at all. (Still haven't figured this one out)

2. The reason I edit the avs was to change the video size. If I would select 4:3, DVD2SVCD would crush the video vertically and add borders (but this was not indicated in the preview frame option, it looked correct) - if I selected 16:9, it would crush it twice as much and add bigger borders. So I edited the avs script to set the res to 480x480 and deleted the add borders statement.

3. I read in another thread that you could save bitrate by setting the res to 352x480 and the dvd player would resize automatically. I tried this and it seems to work fine with no adverse effects. Any reprocussions from doing this?

All in all the video looks great. It kind of suprised me that CCE actually took the 12.5 gb file and didn't choke on it. I'm not very experienced with using filters and can't seem to find much on the actual settings for each, or WHEN to use each. Most of the time you see posts like use this one or that one without explaining HOW/WHEN to use them. I have visited Donald Graft's page but more of the same.

Any thoughts/suggestions on how to achieve better encodes with DV sources? How do you do it?

Mac

[vidaldan]

Hi, I'm also creating SVCDs from uncompressed AVI sources made with Studio DV, but I'm having problems with the sound of the output MPG, which sounds 'metallic' (I'm using TMPGenc)
Please look at my post about it

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29037

Have you encountered the same problem ? or in your case the sound is fine ?

Thanks for any help

[Mac Sidewinder]

I create my svcd with dvd2svcd using the avi input option. It uses besweet and I have had no problems with the sound quality. You can use either cce or tmpge with dvd2svcd. I just find this way a lot easier (since i'm lazy) since it calculates bitrate and fits to a certain cd size automatically for me. Have you tried this way yet?

Mac

[vidaldan]

I've never used the DVD2SVCD until now, I've 'manually' encoded the AVIs this TMPGenc.
Maybe the difference could be with the besweet part, so I'll try with DVD2SVCD using besweet and tmpgenc

Thanks !

[Mac Sidewinder]

No problem. Let me know how it turns out!

Mac

[bb]

If you're using TMPGEnc, did you set it up to use an external encoder, and an external sampling rate converter?

I had the problem of "metallic" sound, too, and in my case it was the internal sampling rate converter. I'm using SSRC now (and tooLame as external encoder), and everything's fine now.

bb

[leandrosml]

what do you do If you have a DV Avi file you want to convert to SVCD, but you don't have a proper DV codec installed?
I use adobe premiere 6 to capture video from my camera and i use DV (pal 48hz) project file to do the editing.
The avi file i get is a DV avi file which cannot be used with dvd2svcd.

i used Canopus_DV_File_Converter to convert dv avi files into microsoft avi files but i get 12 files of 1GB each.
Can anybody tell how can i convert multiple avi files with dvd2svcd at once or any other method to convert the DV avi files in to a SVCD without having a DV codec(which usually costs money).

Thanks for every answer!!!

[waldok]

Look at my thread in the "Capture" section about creating SVCD from a DVD source the analog way (yes, this may sound crazy but it works)

Waldok

[vidaldan]

Regarding the metallic sound issue, I've found that the problem it seems to be with the TMPGenc encoding.
I've tested extracting the WAV from the original AVIs and encoding the sound with BeSweet+toolame and it was a lot better than TMPGenc at the same bitrate (192, 224, and so on). Didn't have to use SSRC for resampling.
So my next move will be to reencode all the AVIs with DVD2SVCD (TPMG+Besweet/toolame) to test all the tools together in the same process.
I'm posting this info in my original thread about the mettalic sound

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29037

Thanks everybody !

[theReal]

i used Canopus_DV_File_Converter to convert dv avi files into microsoft avi files but i get 12 files of 1GB each.

If you're using ntfs and not Fat32, you can create 13GB files using the Panasonic DV codec (it's a MS-codec VFW-mod). I posted a link in the "...guides..." thread.