Hello everyone. First of all, I am new here, and having read some of the topics around, realised that this is a great community online, part of which I want to become Lets get to business now.. I never have had a video camera. Recently I decided to get one, as the family memories are so important and unique.. after looking on whats on market, I decide to get MiniDV type of the video camera. My expectations were that MiniDV is going to bring an excelent quality and ease of use.. so I went for it.. I got JVC GR-D290. Recording was fun.. but when i watched it on tv (having directly pluged into tv) I was veery dissapointed. quality of the movie was realy bad. I went through the dilema of transfering to PC, and finaly got it done by FireWire, but again.. I was realy conserned about the qualiy of the movie.. I took the JVC back.. paied more and got Canon ZR-300. I shot a test movie.. watched on TV, it was better than previous one.. so I am thinking of keeping this camera.. what I want to do though, is to transfer the movie to PC, which I do successfuly and get a HUGE avi file. I have 4 things I want to figure out: 1. can you please, please take a look at my RAW avi samples on this webpage: http://spiluka.com/sample/ and tell me if this quality is what I should expect? I mean is this ok? (QuickTime plugin in my mozilla Firefox shows it even worse..use regular player..) 2. when the RAW avi file is captured it is 720:480 size, could I capture bigger size? or is this standard? 3. My goal is to save 30 or 60 mins of a movie on a CD(dont have DVD burner). can you recommend any compression method and how to do it?(what oftware to use for encoding? - I am a newbie, Here i need th most help ). 4. If I create a VCD, I believe it's realy small in width and height.. will it show ok on tv? and by the way.. is it good that I chose MiniDV? thanks again for your support.. what would I do without you? thanks!!!
I had a look at your samples. It is a DV-AVI file, so that is OK. Size 720x480 is the standard for NTSC, so that is OK as well. Don't be fooled by the way it looks on your PC. DV-AVI is not the best format to play from a hard drive on a PC. If you want 30-60 minutes on a CD, you will need to compress it and you will certainly loose some quality. Nevertheless, using the right compression you will be able to reach reasonable quality. There are many options, but the most common ones are either DivX or MPEG-1. Advantage of MPEG-1 is that it will be playable on any PC without installing any special codec. Also, when you decide to use MPEG-1 according to the VCD standard, you can create a VCD which can also be played on many DVD players these days. The quality that you can reach is comparable with VHS and you will get 74 minutes on a 650MB CD. There are many freeware programs around to encode to mpeg-1. A very popular one is TMPGEnc. Make sure to use the right settings for best quality. Check this: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/reviews/tmpgenc.php Advantage of DivX is that you have a bit more freedom in choosing framesize and bitrate (in principle you also have this freedom with mpeg-1, but it will then no longer be VCD compliant). So if you only need 30 minutes on a CD, you can achieve higher quality than with VCD. Disadvantage is that if you ditribute the CD, people will also need to install a DivX codec in orde to play the file. A limited number of DVD players these days can also play DivX. Conversion to DivX can be done by installing the free DivX codec and use the freeware program VirtualDUB for the conversion. See: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/tutorials/recompress.php Last, but not least: miniDV was the right choice (to my opinion).
Thank you soooooo much for the GREAT answer. I realy appreciate your help! I have several more questions if you dont mind: 1. I have burning software called nero, which can create VCDs, should I create VCDs right from RAW avi file directly by nero, or should I encode it myself first? (I have Xilisoft AVI MPEG encoder) Should I use any other burning software to burn VCD than nero? (I read some post that saied nero is "crap"..) 2. I decide to do folloving: out of the 60 minutes of DV-AVI I will create 1 VCD disk and also 2 CDs which will contain 30 minutes of the movie encoded with mpeg1 (on the CD there will be an actual mpeg file called part1.mpeg with dimentions: 704x576) with the best quality I can get to fit 30 minutes on 1 cd. do u think this is a good idea? 3. as VCD movie dimentions are so small 3**x2** will it show ok on tv?(Forgive my ignorance, it just feels weird to me that it would show ok on tv..) thank you very much again for great answer! edited after this: on one of the posts you saied: "Yes, in principle it is possible. You only need to transfer the tapes to your PC using a Firewire connection. However, one hour of video will take around 80GB..." 80GB? when i transfered half of my tape, I got only 7gig.. does this mean my camcorder does not have a good quality? or maybe the tape?
1. The encoder inside Nero VisionExpress is reasonable but not the best. For best quality use a stand alone encoder. I don't have personal experience with the program that you mention, but I would recommend TMPGEnc (it's free for MPEG-1 anyway). 2 & 3. Before I turned to burning DVD's, I always made VCD's and I was satisfied with the results. As said, the quality is similar to VHS and we all have been watching VHS for many years without complaining about quality, haven't we? But you certainly have to take care to use a decent encoder and use good settings. I never tried mpeg-1 at non VCD standard settings as you suggest, but it may be worth to give it a try... Oops, 80GB, that was a typo. One hour of DV-AVI is around 13GB...
Sorry for butting in but i enjoy reading and learning from TPFKAS's posts. I started out putting my movies on VCD (I'm still a clueless 71 year old newbie) and would like to suggest DVD is the better way to go. Price of DVDs is almost the same as CDs and they hold a lot more. Dvd burners are not that expensive. Now i'm redoing my home movies to DVD and it's a pain to do the same thing again. The VCDs are now scrap. Just my opinion for whatever that may be worth. Yrnehbad
