Encoding

Now that you have your script written. The next thing you need to do is encode it:

AVI:
Simply load the Video in VirtualDub, cut out any irrelevant frames (commercials, bad cuts, etc...), set the Video to "Fast Recompress" (If no VirtualDub filters are used, it's best to set Fast Recompress, since this makes sure that the Color Space remains in YUV, which speeds up encoding by about 10%-20%.
Set the other settings as explained in the previous articles and start encoding.

VCD:
To encode a VCD, I recommend making sure the end resolution is 352x240 for NTSC and 352x288 for PAL. Then load the video in Virtual, cut out any irrelevant frames, set the Video to "Fast Recompress", then frame serve the video to TMPEG Encoder while making sure the appropriate VCD template (PAL VCD or NTSC Film VCD) is loaded and start encoding. Notice that encoding 23.976 NTSC Film VCDs may have issues with certain external DVD Players.

SVCD:
This is quite tricky. One option would be to use TMPEG Encoder in a similar fashion as the VCD encodes. The other would be to use CCE (CinemaCraft Encoder). The problem with CCE is that version 2.6x doesn't accept frame served video, and version 2.50 doesn't accept audio serving.

There are "tricks" to get it to work, but all are rather complex and don't always work properly. The best way is to make sure you have an NTFS formatted hard disk partition (so you could write files over 4gb in size), plenty of free disk space (I'd say around 20-30gb) and then save the video to an AVI HuffYUV (HuffYUV is a lossless compression codec, similar to ZIP compression, and no image quality is lost), while making sure that VirtualDub Video is set to "Fast Compress", Audio is set to PCM (No compression) and that the HuffYUV codec actually saves in YUV (this should be the case if you followed all the instructions, but an added security step would be setting HuffYUVs' "RGB Compression Method" to "Convert to YUY2".

You then take the resulting AVI file and feed it to CCE (side note- make sure CCE doesn't have its Anti-Noise setting enabled as it greatly reduces image quality). Once CCE has finished encoding the SVCD file, run "PULLDOWN.EXE" on the resulting file to make sure it's correctly set for TV display (you can find "pulldown.exe" at Doom9.org.

*And that is it*

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