Encoding DVD in real time from DigitalBeta

[Bill Stephan]

See if you can find someone selling a used Zapex encoder board. Be aware that the company went out of business years ago, so you want at least the board and the software. Better would be a working PC with the board already set-up.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[Siu kei Ip]

Thx for reply!
However, are there any capture cards that have DVD encoding function??
Like Black Magic, Canopus?

[Bill Stephan]

Canopus might have an encoder board similar to Zapex. There is also the Sonic Solutions encoders. Using a Black Magic or Aja capture card requires software encoding after capture.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[Siu kei Ip]

Thx!
I’ve checked Canopus, and find out FIRECODER Blu. IS the quality Okay for retailed DVD?
And what is the minimum requirement of the PC for DVD encoding?

[Bill Stephan]

[Siu Kei Ip] “And what is the minimum requirement of the PC for DVD encoding?”

The manufacturer of the encoder board will have specific requirements for the PC for its products. In general, you want a workstation PC (not an “office” PC) for its segmented PCI bus. You need a faster (and big) second hard drive to store the media. DVD encoding does not require a RAID.

[Siu Kei Ip] “IS the quality Okay for retailed DVD?”

You should demo the encoder you are considering using familiar footage to see whether you like the results.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City

[Siu kei Ip]

Actually, if I decide to buy a capture card and use software encoder for DVD/Blu-ray production, will I get worse quality than hardware realtime encoding?

[Eric Pautsch]

Most encoders are software based these days. Cinemcraft SP is about the finest encoder around unless youre prepared to hand over thousands of dollars

[Siu kei Ip]

How about capture card??
Which one can be used to capture footage from Digibeta/HD??

[Michael Sacci]

Slu,

I have an old Sonic Solution SD2000 card and a computer that can run it. My version for a Mac and it only runs on OS9. I can sell a turnkey system so it really doesn’t matter what system is it. This card has reverse telecine and segment based recoding.

The only advantage of any hardware encoder card is if you are coming from a tape (which is what you said you where doing) You don’t capture and then encode it all happens in one step. But the card is only for encoding for DVD authoring.

If you are interested contact me at onthecow (at) michaelangelodv (dot) com.

Once again Hardware encoder does not give you better than software but it gives you professional quality at real time from tape masters. I will let this go cheap, I just need to replace the computer with any intel mac, a used iMac intel would be fine.

[Jeff Pulera]

The Matrox MXO2 Mini offers realtime MPEG-2 capture straight to .m2v and .wav from Composite, S-video and Component sources, with RCA stereo audio input.

I haven’t messed with this new feature enough to comment on how good the quality is using the realtime capture to MPEG-2 though. Probably not on par with a high-end specialty encoder

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers