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Professional Software Encoder for Mac???
For lack of a better place to post, this ended up here:
I work in a dupe house where we’re constantly authoring DVDs and occasionally authoring Blu-Rays. Several clients bring there material here for high-end compression, for which we use an outdated SD-2000 hardware encoder. If we receive digital files on a hard drive, the biggest problem with that is the workflow: We must go from hard drive, to tape (usually through FCP), then into another deck to re-capture the material from digi-beta into the SD-2000, PC-based system. It does a nice job, especially with individual segment encoding. However, I’d really like to expedite this process and implement a professional-level software encoder on the Mac. Does one exist???
Of course there is compressor, which does an ok job for a run of the mill DVD and/or Blu Ray, but doesn’t offer segment encoding to target really troublesome spots (like glistening water scenes, etc).
Tele-Stream’s Episode seems to be almost the exact same (results) as Compressor, only faster.
I see that CinemaCraft makes a Mac plug-in, but it loses it’s segment encoding capability that it has in its PC version.
It also seems like MainConcept Reference may be a viable solution that enables various resolution block sizes, but I’ve not yet been able to test it to see how it compares to the segment encoding solutions.
Does anyone have professional experience with high-end Mac-based encoding that could enlighten me to a viable solution?
I hope I didn’t offend anyone with my (somewhat frustrated) opinions of the software I’ve looked into. I’m just looking to find suggestions and a solution. Thanks for your help!
Tommy D’Aquino
VideoLabs Corp.
videolabs.net -
2 Replies
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Not much in the way of encoding tool for the Mac. There’s the Cinemacraft Plug-in and Bitvice are the only ones I would use.
Cinemacraft SP3 has segment encoding as does Sony’s Blu-Code and Sonic’s Cinevision – all PC
Why do you have to use a OSX? No reason really IMO
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Don’t really need to use the Mac, just wanting to take advantage of the faster, multi-core machines that we currently have as all of the current PCs (currently in house) are pretty outdated and weak. However, I’m definitely spec’ing out a new PC for the Sonic Scenarist station (another outdated piece of software, but works well for our needs). I’m recommending that we put CC-SP3 on it for our DVD load, but I wanted to further explore Mac options – just in case there were some valid ones.
Thanks for at least supporting what I’ve concluded with my feeble research!
-Tommy
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