Battsman
14th February 2005, 16:41
I just bought the CCE Basic and tried my first pass at converting a few home movies to dvd. Now, I didn't use AviSynth, being totally new to this whole thing.
While I like the dvd tremendously better than the original tape, for convenience, I'm not sure what are realistic expectations. I guess I was hoping that the resulting movie would be like TV quality, but it wasn't really. For comparison, I hooked my camcorder to my television, using the rca jacks, and the dvd and the tape look about the same.
I would have expected the dvd to look better - my thinking was, the dvd was created by importing a digital signal via firewire, while the camcorder is connected via RCA jacks. I guess the degradation from RCA jacks about equals the degradation from compressing and encoding.
One, my expectations may be totally out of whack. Two, my approach may be totally off base. So ... I thought I'd ask you guys!
My approach is simple. I bought the Sony TRV-460 so I could use the firewire connection to import my old HI-8 tapes (and I have since recorded some in digital-8 format).
I use Nero Studio to import the movie, then CCE to encode it, then I use the shareware TMPGenc to multiplex the audio and video files (from CCE) into one mpg file. Finally, I create the movie in Nero Studio.
As for CCE options, I've tried both the DVD and MPEG-2 settings, with 2000 min, 6000 avg, and 8000 or 8500 max, and I used a quantization of 25.
On the one movie I encoded using DVD, the sound is way off in the final dvd, though if I play the encoded mpg file on my PC, it's fine. That's very strange, but I suppose I should stick with the MPEG-2 setting.
Now, is it worth it for me to learn AviSynth? Is the quality significantly better than just using CCE straight? Thanks.
While I like the dvd tremendously better than the original tape, for convenience, I'm not sure what are realistic expectations. I guess I was hoping that the resulting movie would be like TV quality, but it wasn't really. For comparison, I hooked my camcorder to my television, using the rca jacks, and the dvd and the tape look about the same.
I would have expected the dvd to look better - my thinking was, the dvd was created by importing a digital signal via firewire, while the camcorder is connected via RCA jacks. I guess the degradation from RCA jacks about equals the degradation from compressing and encoding.
One, my expectations may be totally out of whack. Two, my approach may be totally off base. So ... I thought I'd ask you guys!
My approach is simple. I bought the Sony TRV-460 so I could use the firewire connection to import my old HI-8 tapes (and I have since recorded some in digital-8 format).
I use Nero Studio to import the movie, then CCE to encode it, then I use the shareware TMPGenc to multiplex the audio and video files (from CCE) into one mpg file. Finally, I create the movie in Nero Studio.
As for CCE options, I've tried both the DVD and MPEG-2 settings, with 2000 min, 6000 avg, and 8000 or 8500 max, and I used a quantization of 25.
On the one movie I encoded using DVD, the sound is way off in the final dvd, though if I play the encoded mpg file on my PC, it's fine. That's very strange, but I suppose I should stick with the MPEG-2 setting.
Now, is it worth it for me to learn AviSynth? Is the quality significantly better than just using CCE straight? Thanks.