General Guide - Page 2
( Source: www.oldskool.org/mpeg/mpegfaq.html) )

How about quality?

The quality of most MPEG encoders is directly tied to the quality of the input you give them. Remember the old adage, "Garbage in, Garbage out?" It's most evident when encoding MPEGs.

If you give an encoder a noisy signal with lots of weak broadcasting artifacts, the encoder will try to include all of that in the output, which makes for a noisy bitstream. If your source is extremely clean (or live, like the live output of a video camera), your end result will be clean. Some encoders are much better than others, but the primary  factor affecting the output is the quality of your input.

Frames vs. Fields. Video is 30 (25 for PAL) frames a second, right? Wrong.

Video has a framerate of 30, but each frame consists of two interlaced fields. A field is a completely new picture. Here's another way to understand it: Each NTSC "image" is made up of 240 (288 for PAL) lines. A 480-line capture, therefore, has two "images" in it--the odd scan lines (1, 3, 5, etc.) make up the first image, and the even scantiness (2, 4, 6, etc.) make up the second image.

The second image is displayed 1/60th (1/50th for PAL) of a second after the first image, then you move onto the next frame. If you still have trouble understanding this, try playing a video with high motion in it in your VCR and then hit "pause". Notice how the freezed-frame tends to "flicker" or "jitter" quickly between two different images? That's because only one frame is being displayed, and is quickly alternating between the two fields 60 times a second.

I would recommend that you capture your video in PAL format. All the commercial VCDs I have seen from places like Hong Kong, Singapore etc. are encoded in PAL format, as this provides more lines and hence better quality. It is possible to encode in NTSC, but you would only do this if you intend to play the VCDs back on a player which only supports NTSC output.

A typical example of this type of player would be a NTSC home DVD player (if the player has been modified for multi-region playback then PAL is not a problem in this case either).

(In the case of a VideoCd there's no problem of region code or tv system output of player. If you play a Pal Videocd into a NTSC player, you will have cut about 40 lines.)

If the VCDs are only going to be played back on PCs, or with a PSX VCD adapter, then PAL works fine.

How about Software Encoding?

Software MPEG encoding takes a really, really long time unless you have a 500MHz (or faster) machine. Hardware encoders are either real-time (they encode the video as fast as it comes in) or faster than real-time (they encode off of .AVI files at about 3:1 or faster--a minute of video gets encoded in 20 seconds).

Does a hardware MPEG encoder produce better output than a software MPEG encoder?

It depends on the price, but the general answer is no. Consumer hardware encoders only encode the first field of a video frame and completely ignore the second field, so you lose motion quality. And because they have to encode in real time, there usually isn't enough processing time left over to do noise filtering, so the output can be noisier than a software encoder if your input is noisy.

Of course, software encoding takes forever and a day, so there is still a valid reason to buy hardware encoders. If you have very clean source material, the output of a hardware encoder matches (and sometimes exceeds, in special cases) the output of a software encoder.

What's the best hardware MPEG encoder in a consumer price range?

General consensus points to the Broadway being the best, with all others trailing slightly in terms of output quality. It's a bit pricy at $800, but it can deal with marginal source material much better than the others, and can also output back to TV (the Dazzle DVC can also output to TV). I am unsure if it captures and/or takes into consideration both video fields, however. (Broadway encode only video, audio is encoded by sound card of your hardware. You can have problems of audio and video synchronization. There's a lot of mpeg audiovideo encoders boards, check at :

www.bernclare.com/mpegprod.htme
www.heuris.com
www.digitalvideosolutions.com/products.htm

What's the best software MPEG encoder in a consumer price range?

- Latest Panasonic Mpeg1 encoder seems to have the best quality around. It comes stand alone and with Premiere plug-in. Others encoders are:
- Ligos' LSX-MPEG encoder. It's one of the fastest of the bunch, has a ton of options, and even has support for MPEG-2 if you want to experiment with DVD bitstream creation.
- Xing's encoder is just as fast, but doesn't handle low bitrate or high-motion clips quite as well as Ligos' encoder does. Also comes with a free Premiere plug-in.
- Darim's DVMPEG is another very good encoder. It has support for Mpeg2 streams and in general has good quality and speed.

How can I avoid the Windows 2gig .AVI file size limitation when encoding MPEGs?

Two ways: You can either generate many MPEG files from different clips and later join the MPEGs together, or you can generate the entire thing from your editing program.

Joining clips together is the cheap method; you can find several programs to do this at www.mpeg.org, but one popular program that does this under Windows is Camel's MPEG Joiner. (Note: If you are creating a Video CD, you might not have to join video clips together at all). Most VCD authoring programs allow you to create a "simple video sequence" that plays the MPEGs one right after the other.

There are a couple of ways to do a long, unbroken sequence. The method I use is to put together my entire project in Premiere, then use Xing's Premiere plug-in to export the entire timeline to a single MPEG file. You can also use Darim's DVMPEG to output an entire timeline to a single MPEG.

How can I avoid the Windows 2gig .AVI file size limitation when outputting to tape?

If you have a "prosumer" package, such as the Miro DC30+, you probably already have a special version of Premiere that can either work with files larger than 2gig, or can play multiple files from the timeline seamlessly after rendering transitions. In the Miro product, this appears as a plug-in called "Miro InstantVideo".

For those of us without the budget for such a product, there is an excellent shareware program that, in addition to being a powerful real-time NLE program, can string multiple pre-rendered clips together on a timeline and play them in sequence without dropping a single frame. Some of these programs are: DDClip, AVI/IO , RealCap.

I've used it to string together multiple Iomega BUZ-captured clips with the same resolution and audio parameters, and it played them one right after the other without any dropped frames. I was able to output 10 2gig clips to tape (about 24 minutes of video) using DDClip without having to touch the VCR.