Best VCD Resolution and audio?
 

i got an avi source resolution 512x384 what is the best resolution to use.528x480, 352x480, 352x240?. i want to loose as little quality as
possible. 352x480 seems like a good choice but then it'll upscale my source's width?. also the audio is stereo. should i encode it as stereo, joint-stereo or dual channel?.

Its better to upscale the width than the high!
The most of the sharpness we preserve from maintaining the high of a movie.
So you have to decide and make a compromise between resolution and filesize! 352x480, 480x480, 528x480 or 704x480 in case of NTSC.

Audio: Its really enough to encode the audio using 128kbit at 44.1Khz even surround matrix based stereo streams.
You also should only use "stereo" as encoding parameter, Joint-Stereo could kill the surround matrix in the stereo data. Some say not and some say yes as I figured out this too.

BUT if your source is Divix which already contais a very compressed audio 48khz Stream at 128kbit you shouldn't encode it at 128kbit again cause of quality loss when re-compressing it ... in this case use for example 160kbit to maintain the Audio quality.

thanks!.

Excuse me but when converting from 512*384 to 352*480, where do you see you upscale the WIDTH ?

Are you sure you understand what is the width ?

Well if my english isn't that bad I do understand whats the width.
As I also learned thats why 480x576 (PAL) won't be that unsharp on TV cause there will only be scaled the width ... as we know (only to mention that I understand it ... but I think above I explained this using misunderstanding words, sorry for my english ;-) )
Dialhot ... ok in his case there will be a downscaling of the width (if he uses moviestacker which will do it for him) but my answer was meant generally just to understand the basic so if someone else reads this thread too he can assume what to do. :wink:

In this case as dialhot is right, set in moviestacker the cropping option to accurate and see that the high of the movie in the resize fields at the high value will NOT change the 384 and set at Target "1/2 DVD"(352x480). By doing this the borders will be correct added without scaling the high and the correct aspect ratio will be preserved by moviestackers AR calculations.
I'm right now in my office on a MAC ;-) but I will verify this tonight by checking this in moviestacker.

That was cristalin for me, and I wanted to be sure that it would be for everyone else.

height (no offense ;-))

In the present case, there won't be any border as 512*384 is already a 4:3 picture.

things like this never seem to me like an offense but rather help ;-)
And thats why my last post at the end was wrong!
If he tries hardly to maintain the height at 384 in this case of 4:3 and 352x480 target size the size would result as 288x384 and borders added! Including BIG borders added at the sides 32+288+32!! ALERT! :oops:
(Thats why I never should say such things refering to values/resizing using "NTSC" if I'm at work) :D

@ hotwok
In case of 4:3 Avi 512x384 to 352x480 use this:
BicubicResize(352,480,0,0.6,0,0,512,384)

or the easy way .... "gripfit" ;-)