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Help! Looking to buy more stuff.
My company has asked me to put together a wish list. I have already put things on there like Boris Continuum Complete and the Sapphire plugins, as well as some stuff from Digital Juice. So I’m looking for any other programs that you guys out there use and like that I can research.
I’m also thinking about adding a hardware mpeg encoder to the list. The majority of our end products go out on DVD and I’m looking for a better solution than what I’m getting with Compressor. So any ideas there would be good too.
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4 Replies
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[tyleredit] “The majority of our end products go out on DVD and I’m looking for a better solution than what I’m getting with Compressor. So any ideas there would be good too.”
It’s not hardware based, but BitVice is one of the best software encoders out there. I’m upgrading it today actually as I’m not happy with the high quality DVD setting in the current Compressor either.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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My company is willing to spend the money on a hardware encoder if it will definitely give us better quality images. Do you have any experience with hardware encoders? Also, I tried the demo version of BitVice months ago when we were trying to fix an issue with pixelation within dissolves and it didn’t seem to fix that problem. I might just have the wrong settings or maybe it is the nature of working with stuff shot on HDV but I’ve run into this problem with the dissolves quite a bit.
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[tyleredit] “Also, I tried the demo version of BitVice months ago when we were trying to fix an issue with pixelation within dissolves and it didn’t seem to fix that problem.”
That’s something I’ve never seen, even with Compressor. Sounds like a really low data rate or a low setting on the Motion estimation. Or it could be the HDV codec. I mean something that starts 25:1 compressed and then compressed again for DVD doesn’t sound like a very pretty picture.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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I haven’t heard any comparisons of hardware vs software encoders lately. It would seem the software encoders have caught up to the hardware encoders as far as quality goes but then there’s the time factor to consider (this is diminishing rapidly with the advent or quad dual core). The only new one I’ve heard of since sonic solutions and wired media press era is the merlin line by sky micro. These look interesting but they are definately not cheap.
When you think of the consumer vcr type burners out and how effortlessly they encode from 1 to 8 hrs of video and burn to disc in real time you would think we would have more options for this type of tool. It is possible to do 2 pass VBR encoding on your hardware card and if after scrutiny, you can re-do segments in your editing app, adding compressioin markers in these tricky areas and then re-encode in compressor and stitch them back together in the timeline of your authoring app. It would be nice if these cards could read the compression markers from fcp.
Also try the dvd authoring forum for more info in this area.
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