Of course, I also keep a high-resolution digital8 copy in anticipation of the time when I'll want a higher resolution on my TV screen. And it sure beats Apple's solution of buying a top-of-the-line Mac with a SuperDrive and burning onto blank DVDs at $10 per blank. The resulting VCD is easier to store and cheaper to make than the older VHS copies.
WILL TOAST BURN A VCD MOVIE
These days, we tell iMovie to output the edited movie to Toast and Toast burns the movie onto a CD-R. Then the camcorder output was copied onto a VHS tape so it would be easier to watch next time. The way we used to do it was to blindly reach in behind the VCR and eventually plug wires from the camcorder into the VCR's audio and video inputs.
But, once the masterpiece is back in the camcorder, the nuisance shows up: how do we watch it on TV? My ten-year-old daughter is an expert at it, and has used iMovie to edit several school projects. Connecting the camcorder to my G4 to read the originals and write the edited masterpieces back to tape is effortless. About a year ago, I got a Sony TRV-320 digital8 camcorder and started editing my home movies with iMovie. In addition, any QuickTime movie can be used to create a Video CD by simply dragging it onto Toast's Video CD format window. It includes a plugin for iMovie that allows you to burn your movie to Video CD directly from iMovie 2.0.1 or newer.
WILL TOAST BURN A VCD SOFTWARE
The easiest software for making VCDs is the new Toast 5 Titanium from Roxio (Toast 5 Titanium can automatically convert digital video into VCDs in several different ways. Since a VCD is just an ordinary compact disk, given a CD-RW drive and a little software, you can make one yourself. But, almost all TV we watch is only at NTSC resolution, and most TVs can't even show higher resolutions than NTSC, so VCD gives a perfectly acceptable picture it's about the same resolution you've been watching all your life.
This is much lower than a DVD, which uses MPEG-2 compression at a resolution of 700x480. The video on a VCD is compressed using the MPEG-1 standard, and is at an NTSC resolution of 352x240. Chances are good that the DVD player you got last Christmas will also play VCDs. But the spectacular number of DVD players sold over the last couple of years has changed all that. Until recently, it was almost impossible to find a standalone VCD player in the United States. In fact, if you're a fan of Hong Kong action movies or Japanese anime, it's easy to find Web sites that will sell you either in VCD format. China alone manufactures two million VCD players every year and there may be as many as 40 million in use throughout Asia. In Asia, Video CD players are roughly as common as VCRs in North America. Video CD was introduced by Philips and Sony in 1993, and, unfortunately, never caught on in North America, but it became a huge success in Asia, where most households didn't already have VCRs. Apple's big push over the last year has been for desktop DVDs with the expensive SuperDrive, and they seem to be missing the boat on VCDs.Ī VCD is an ordinary compact disk that can contain about an hour's worth of video with a resolution just a little bit lower than standard VHS tape. The example that's been bothering me for the last year or so is the Video CD, or VCD for short. Sometimes the whole computer industry, especially including Apple, go for a home run when most of their customers would be just as happy with a bunt single.
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