Making a Vcd of my DV videos, does it have to suck?

norfanorfa
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
I made a two minute home video and transfered it to Vcd format so i could play it back in my DVD player, which plays Vcd's DVD, MP3's , CD's etc. It was really cool. Maybe not DVD quality, but defintely better than analogue tape. So I said to myself " Self , you gotta do all your home movies like this." and nodded my little head. So then, I uprgrade iMovie to the latest and Toast to the latest version so I can go straight from iMovie into Toast Vcd format, using quicktime. I load my finished video from last summer back onto my drive from the cassette tape it was stored on, and voila, there was "Save to Toast VCD" right there on my Quicktime save menu. That was Saturday night. Here we are it's Monday noon. My counter has gone from 2600 minutes remaining to 933 minutes remaining. My iBook has been on , working all that time along with my firewire drive. I must say, this is total bullshit. At this point I'm guessing that this will be done sometime tomorrow. The crazy thing is, I don't even know if this file is going to fit on a Vcd. You can't tell me that 43 hours to encode 55 minutes of video is the best this computer can do. 6 to 8 hours i can live with. Anybody got a solution?



[ 03-11-2002: Message edited by: norfa ]</p>

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    ccr65ccr65 Posts: 59member
    A windows computer will take a comparitively long time to encode the video as well. 55 min. will fit on a VCD. Use a CDRW disk if you go direct to disk. if you rip from a disk image you can get away with CD/R. This is a lot of number crunching. Unless you are prepared to buy much more expensive hardware and software, let it go and come back when it's done even if you have OSX you don't want to use up CPU time with anything else.



    MPEG 4 will be even more demanding. To take less time you would have to skip the conversion process and capture toand edit in MPEG 1. iMovie won't do that.
  • Reply 2 of 9
    norfanorfa Posts: 171member
    Hey it's done. I don't think I would have had the patience except for the part where i have 2 computers and I can afford to let one sit. But I did the whole disk in one file, 55 minutes in 521 mg and just under 2 days to encode. (I gotta get a G4 iMac.Thank god OSX is stable , if it had crashed just before finishing, I doubt i would have started it again. Now for my next project, I want a menu, anyone got a head start on this?



    Oh buy the way, the cd is excellent, not as good as DVD but I think better than analogue, and I'm betting that 5 years down the line, it's gonna be way better than analogue.



    [ 03-11-2002: Message edited by: norfa ]</p>
  • Reply 3 of 9
    daniel shockdaniel shock Posts: 5member
    Did you have any trouble with the audio being out of synch for such a long file?



    I've done the same thing you are doing, but if I try exporting a clip longer than 20 minutes or so then the audio starts getting out of synch with the video.
  • Reply 4 of 9
    jonathan leejonathan lee Posts: 7member
    that sucks. 2 days to make a vcd version of a DV. i was going to get an ibook so i could make vcd's on the road of my videos. what the hell's the point of iMovie if it takes 2 days to transfer a file onto a vcd? if you edit a video what are you supposed to do with the edited version. save it on the hard drive?
  • Reply 5 of 9
    ccr65ccr65 Posts: 59member
    That's digital video folks! It doesn't matter if you have a 2.2Ghz pentium or a dual Ghz PowerMac or an iBook. This stuff takes a long long long time. Processor speed is important but no desktop machine or laptop these days is the kind of realtime video processing monster people hope they will be. Computers will have to be a whole lot faster before this situation gets any better. Just relax, budget your time and enjoy that you can do something that wasn't even possible on a portable computer until say 2 years ago.
  • Reply 6 of 9
    norfanorfa Posts: 171member
    Hey, I trid this under OS9 on my DVSE which is nominally slower than my iBook and it took about 10 hours, one quarter the length of my iBook project. Now the bad, news, the sound cuts out, like totally cuts out when I use it on my DVD player up stairs. I just missed out on the chance to trade my iMac, iBook and CD-R and Airport for a 550 mhz G4 powerbook, with built in CD-R and 20 gig drive, damn.



    [ 04-05-2002: Message edited by: norfa ]</p>
  • Reply 7 of 9
    matsumatsu Posts: 6,558member
    Norfa,



    what speed is your G3?
  • Reply 8 of 9
    havanashavanas Posts: 99member
    VCD is the same bitrate as cd so you can get at least 74 minutes on one. NTSC vcd is 352 x 240 compared to DVDs 480 x 720 resolution. The encoding may be getting slowed down by the resize of the DV video down to vcd rez. I ussually output from AfterEffects(better quality than QTs resize last i checked) to native vcd rez(as high quality quicktime) then compress after that using an old version of Astarte mpack. Astarte is the german company apple bought. DVD Studio Pro (or whatever its called) is a rebranding of an old Astarte app.
  • Reply 9 of 9
    dustbunnydustbunny Posts: 24member
    Perhaps a stupid suggestion (i'm not that familiar with vcd's and video editting). But a while back, i made a vcd from an Final Cut Pro movie file. Worked kinda okay. Just export your movie as a FCP self contained movie and toast it



    I hope it works and it will be faster for you.



    DB
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