• Compression Techniques

  Best way to go from HD to 768K/384K dualstream in WMV?

  Posted by Stuartmx on November 14, 2005 at 5:10 pm

  So I’m shooting with the FX1, and have yet to find a decent way to get really sharp footage encoded to a WMV in a reasonable amount of time.

  So far I have tried:
  – Capturing with Premiere and exporting with Premiere (resulted in dropped frames, and took 5 hours+ to encode to WMV)
  – Downlinking on the camera and going straight to WMV Encoder, which works for real time but the quality is missing, and does not help if I want to do more than one camera
  – Capturing in real time with Vegas, and exporting the WMV from there (worked alright, still took a few hours)
  – Capturing in real time with Vegas, running the m2t through Cineframe, and then running the resulting avi through Cleaner. This resulted in the best quality, but took the longest of all.
  – Capturing with Vegas, converting with Cineframe, and running the avi through Squeeze. This didn’t work at all, and crashed Squeeze every time.
  – Capturing with FCP 5 and exporting the wmv with flip4mac, which also took a few too many hours than I would like.

  Does anyone have any ideas? We are trying to get the final output to be extremely crisp, with a width of 720 and a height of 408. I was looking at Canopus’ ProCoder and thought that might help, or a hardware encoder like Sonic’s. Price isn’t really an issue as long as it will be a very high quality in a reasonable amount of time.

  -Matt

  Charles Simonson replied 20 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Ben Waggoner

  November 15, 2005 at 1:31 am

  HD encoding is slow.

  If you need it to be fast, I’d recommend ProCoder, which would let you reduce the Encoder Complexity to 1. That’ll encode a lot faster, albeit at somewhat of a quality hit.

  My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
  Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
  Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html
• 

  Charles Simonson

  November 15, 2005 at 2:58 am

  I have to agree on ProCoder as well, in my recent tests it came out as the best software encoder for WMV9 at constrained bitrates on the PC. If cost truly isn’t an issue, then there are some hardware solutions available for real-time or faster than real-time for SD content encoding; but the price is significantly greater than just a software only app.

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