outside_ag
Oct 2002
Doctor of Journalism
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quote: Originally posted by strawhair
i am a fan of svcd as all my dvd players are capable of playing the format and also -and maybe i am wrong here-but i think the higher resolution format can actually improve the picture quality-however slightly-regardless of source.
6.5/7/6
daniel
You can never improve the resolution of an image beyond that of the source (filtering is possible, but not the same). I don't know what kind of camera Centropy is using, but if you compare it to UTI cams, for instance, you will see that there is obviously way less resolution in the image. No matter what format you use, you can never add additional resolution to the image.
SVCD has some advantages, in particular that MPEG-2 is a much more aggressive compression algorithm than MPEG-1, and thus yields much better results with the same bits-per-pixel. The downside is that a lot of SVCD releases actually use fewer bits-per-pixel than VCD due to the increased resolution (number of pixels) of the image, so whether or not the final compression quality is really any better depends (it usually should be, i think.) Now, if the additional pixels are unnecessary, due to the low resolution of the source, it becomes really questionable as to whether SVCD gives any quality enhancement whatsoever.
As to the resolution of a camera: Irregardless of the format (VHS-C/8mm, SVHS-C/Hi-8, Digital-8) and the resolution it is capable of recording, the tape can only record what is captured by the camera's CCD. I could be wrong on this, but I think the primary factor determining low-light performance is CCD size. Very low grade consumer cameras use 1/6" CCDs, some use 1/4", the best use 1/3", and the very best, Canon XL-1, uses 3 CCDs, one for each color. Even if a group is using a DV camera, if it is a $500 dollar model with a small, low-quality CCD, the results will be poor.
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