Looking for a reliable movie compression tool…

[Craig Seeman]

[Mike Gray] “I’ve tried an eval of Autodesk Cleaner – pretty good but has some mysterious crash/hangs and doesn’t fix the moov atom correctly.
“

Why look at dead software? It’s not even a player. It doesn’t even fit in with the description of your needs.

When you say 100s that implies Enterprise level product.
Without a budget all we can do is throw out names.
Telestream FlipFactory (or the upcoming Vantage)
Rhozet Carbon Coder
Telestream Episode (upcoming 6 more so than 5).
I’m not sure if Microsoft Expression Encoder can handle the volume you’re looking at but that’s another thing to look at.
Sorenson Squeeze might be worth a look but I’m also not sure it can handle the workload or the codecs you have.

[Mike Gray] “Input – 100’s of uncompressed QT movie files with audio at a non-standard broadcast resolution “
Quicktime is a wrapper so you’ve given us no codec information. I don’t know what a “non-standard broadcast resolution” is. It either follows a standard or doesn’t.

[Mike Gray]

Thanks for the encouraging, up-beat reply(!)

100’s – actually ~120 – not an ongoing workload, but just too many to do reliably manually using say QT Pro. It’s a one-off we need to get right and maybe replicate the pipeline in the future.

Input – “100’s of uncompressed QT movie files” i.e. using the ‘NONE’ codec and a lossless audio codec. I’m aware that QT is a wrapper.

“Non-standard broadcast resolution” – the files are 384 x 288 @ 25 fps w 1:1 square pixels – they’re not standard PAL/NTSC dimensions at either SD/HD resolution.

I know Cleaner wasn’t quite up to the job – that’s why I’m posting here!

Budget $0 – $700

Thanks for listing the other apps – I’ll take a look.

MG

[Craig Seeman]

That paints a much more specific picture. The more detail you provide the more accurate and faster response you get.

You might have to stretch the budget a couple of hundred dollars depending on the importance of batch encode limits.

Telestream Episode
Soreneson Squeeze

[Chris Blair]

Procoder can also handle what you need and it’s bascially Carbon Coder without the ability to handle as many input and output formats. But it can easily handle what you describe.

There’s also a freebie app you could try called MediaCoder. It’ll do batches and should handle your input/output requirements. The only negative is you have to figure out how to turn off the programs web popups. It will pause every 8 or so encodes from a large batch and ask you to visit a “sponsor’s” site. You can turn it off but you have to dig deep into the advanced settings to do so and there are about 3 different settings you have to “uncheck” to get it to stop. The program also opens to a web page upon launch, but there’s a checkbox at the bottom of that website you just untick to make that stop. It’s open-source software much like Handbrake, and if you can get past the popups, it works very well. The other drawback is because it’s interface can be confusing. But they’ve recently updated it to where you can set it up in a more simplified mode that doesn’t require a lot of user knowledge or intervention.

Just remember it’s free software and it’s interface and function isn’t going to be as elegant as a paid app. But we use it occasionally and when configured properly, it’s an excellent app.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com