A
VCD (video compact disc) is nothing more than a CD containing
moving pictures and sound. You can capture from your PC
into a VCD that's capable of playing in almost all stand-alone DVD
players.
Digitizing is a way to convert analog video into data you can store
on your hard drive. To do this, you need a video capture card or, if you
have a digital video camera, a 1394 or FireWire port.
You first need to capture your video to hard drive using the best
quality capture card that you can afford. I must have a color depth of at least 24 bits per pixel. The
chief limitation here is the speed of your system and size of your hard
drives.
You can capture analog video (VHS, Hi8 etc) utilizing an external
component that lets you convert analog video to digital video or digital
video to analog video. There are many devices out there but only a few
that work well. Contact us to discuss in more detail. These devices come
with video capturing and editing software, some are great some are a
little lean in features depending on the quality of your device.
Once you have the movies on your drive, the next thing you need to do
is convert the video to a format that will play is either a standard DVD
player on your PC or at home depending on what you want the result to be. The video files must be converted to MPEG-1,
2, 4 or DivX video. More details will be posted on this soon.
Convert and burn
If you don't want to take the easy route of using Nero to
automatically encode and burn VCDs, then try using a separate conversion
program. If your video files are AVIs, then you can use the free program
avi2vcd to encode them, or
a hardware encoder such as the ConvertX from Plextor (www.plextor.com)
a favorite at NTI.
Another free conversion program is TMPGEnc,
which is capable of converting DivX, AVI, QuickTime, and Windows video
to VCD-compatible MPEG-1 video.
Once you've converted the video files you'll need to create the VCDs'
file structure and menus. To do this, use a free program called VCDEasy.
Once the final VCD setup is complete, VCDEasy generates a CD-ROM image
file that you can burn to CD. The ConvertX hardware encoder comes with
everything you need from start to finish and will also endode to DivX
and MPEG-1, 2, & 4.
Additional resources
If the general guidelines presented in this article don't cover your
specific requirements, make sure to visit VCD
Help. This site features everything you'd ever want to know about
authoring, converting, and capturing VCDs, SVCDs, and DVDs.
