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Compressor 3 or Nattress Converter?
Hi
Just wondering about investing in the Nattress Standards Converter, but see that Compressor 3 makes big claims about “optical flow technology to produce pristine standards conversions”. I need to go from PAL to NTSC, anyone got any comments?
Thanks
David Scott -
15 Replies
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This technology is available in the current version of Compressor and has been for some time, but it is extremely slow. Supposedly this has been improved in v3. However they were talking about this being three times faster. Unfortunately Compressor was many, many more than three times slower than the Nattress software. Actual results cannot be tested until the product is released.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs
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The Natress converters do a fine job and I have used them in the past with great results.
David
Peace and Love 🙂
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The Nattress Converter is excellent.
Though Compressor 2 can do the job, it can literally take DAYS to render. Not really worth it unless you are talking about a couple of quick shots.
I did hear this will be improved in Compressor 3, but unless you have a top of the line Octo-core Mac Pro, I doubt it will be improved enough to be usable. -
i got some nasty strobing when converting from NTSC to PAL with Compressor 2. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but Nattress Converter did the job without a glitch. not sure how well Compressor 3 will work, but I’m sure Nattress Converter will still be worth the money.
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Compressor has that new feature though of sending an instance of each batch to separate processors on your Mac… Don’t know about statistics exactly, but do know that an h.264 encode can be 300% time if done with Compressor 3 on an octo mac… THAT’s a major speed up from Compressor 2…
Nattress’ converters are first rate however. and Compressor 3 is more than a month away…
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer
Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here
Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D
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My slightly biassed take is this:
If you want utterly pristine conversion, and can wait for literally days, Compressor does the best job.
If you want a pretty darn good conversion that renders about 40 times quicker (at last time I checked) then my conversion plugin is the way to go.
If you want 60i to 24p, I’d probably use mine no matter what as that mode looks great, as does 25p to 60i conversions.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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can you take a look at these?
https://maxf.net/~alichek/ConversionComp/
so far i feel i’m getting the better result going to PAL from NTSC from your converter than from Compressor (in general smoother motion, not the first project doing this). But it seems to work properly only with DV. I would like to make it work with higher quality image. Maybe it’s a general FCP issue I think, because I cannot make render in Animation or None without completely ruining the picture.
btw., compressor switches to upper field first order when converting to pal uncompressed 4:2:2. is upper field first a default for PAL? should i be switching to that?
Thank you very much for your help.
Alec. -
PAL uncompressed is upper field first (PAL DV is lower, though)
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Usually PAL is upper, but it’s mostly capture card dependent on what it and the codec want. Aren’t fields pesky and annoying 🙂
For what it’s worth, all HD is upper.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects and Standards Conversion for FCP
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Hi Everyone
Thanks for all your coments – Nattress it is!
David Scott
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