[cshuman]

I burned my first VCD today and was so excited. Excited, that is, until I played it on my DVD player and discovered the quaility was horrible.

I used iMovie2 to edit and exported for iDVD with the default settings. I then booted into OS 9 and used Toast Titanium to do the MPEG1 encoding, which took all night on my 266Mhz Gossamer.

I guess my question would be, is there a way to do a higher quality mpg encode. I have heard you can get an hour on a cd, but would rather only get 30 minutes and have twice the quality. Is there another encoder which would yield better results or have user selectable quality options?

Any info you have on this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by cshuman:
<STRONG>I used iMovie2 to edit and exported for iDVD with the default settings. I then booted into OS 9 and used Toast Titanium to do the MPEG1 encoding, which took all night on my 266Mhz Gossamer.
</STRONG>

Why did you export for iDVD (I don't have it, so I don't know anything about this step...perhaps it adds in some compression, and that's why your quality was so poor)? If you have iMovie, Toast and Quicktime Pro, you can import the footage directly into iMovie, then open the big iMovie DV file in QT Pro, and export directly to a VCD format that Toast will burn as a VCD.

I'm pretty new at this as well, and this is how I've done it. The process still will take all night, by the way (my G3-400 churns and churns...one of the advantages of OS 10 is that QT's export process won't hog your entire computer).

The only problems I've experienced with making VCDs is that I begin to experience audio lag at about 30 minutes in, and after that the audio will be as much as a couple of seconds out of sync with the video. The quality of both, though, is pretty nice. Video looks *very* watchable, and audio sounds fine. They're just out of sync....

[cshuman]

I am exporting the movie from iMovie which yields a .mov file. Maybe it is compressed at that point and then by Toast. Maybe I'll try the advanced option and make sure there is no compression.

[jtc]

If you've installed toast titanium, there should be NTSC and PAL VCD export option in iMovie. You don't need to use QT or toast (except to burn). I've done several VCDs this way, and the quality is very good. If you have shorter movies, consider XVCD or SVCDs, you can use a higher bit rate (and higher res for svcd), and the quality is much better.

[fulmer]

yes, you want to export as DV NTSC or DV PAL. this is basically the best quality you're going to get--it's like raw DV footage. And if you have toast titanium 5 for os 9 then I recommend updating to the os x compatible version. it is just as good here in os x land.

[midwinter]

Originally posted by fulmer:
<STRONG>yes, you want to export as DV NTSC or DV PAL. this is basically the best quality you're going to get--it's like raw DV footage. And if you have toast titanium 5 for os 9 then I recommend updating to the os x compatible version. it is just as good here in os x land. </STRONG>

Is there a difference in quality between exporting from iMovie and form QT? Especially the audio lag I mentioned in my response... I guess there's probably not, but one never knows.

Cheers
Scott