WMV encoding

[Craig Seeman]

[Emma DeGraz] ” will be running them through cleaner. I am looking for the fastest encode that will result in decent quality.”
There’s an inherent technical contradiction here. Cleaner is very slow and it uses WMV7 so it’s quality is horrible at a given bit rate compared to WMV9. This is assuming you’re on a Mac.

[Emma DeGraz] “Are there any suggestions for WMV settings that I can use to get the fastest compression with decent enough quality for client approval? “

Although I’m an Episode fan I’d consider using Squeeze for this specifically. The only useful thing you can do with Cleaner at this point is delete it so you can gain some useful hard drive space.

I can’t see anyone having any reason to use Cleaner on either Mac or Windows at this point.

Even if you’re on Windows Episode and Squeeze are available to you but you might consider Expression Encoder if you’re heavy into WMV and it does encode to H.264 as well.

[Emma Degraz]

Unfortunately cleaner is all that my company has and Squeeze and Episode will give me watermarks with the free trials. Anything i can do in cleaner to speed this up? I lowered my data rate to 1000kb/s from 1500 but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.

[Craig Seeman]

[Emma DeGraz] “Unfortunately cleaner is all that my company has and Squeeze and Episode will give me watermarks with the free trials.”
Is it worth losing the client over $500-$800 purchase which you’ll use in the future? The company gets to decide whether they want to keep the client happy or not.

You can certainly do a speed test on one file with the trials to see if it’s worth the purchase.

[Emma DeGraz] “Anything i can do in cleaner to speed this up? I lowered my data rate to 1000kb/s from 1500 but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.”
Sorry but the Ford Model T can not even making the qualifying time for the Indy 500 let alone win the race. Cleaner was last updated 4 years ago give or take. There’s nothing to do but get slow encodes and horrible files unless you go to higher data rates than you’d use for WMV9.

If you have an intel Mac you’d be better off getting an OEM version of Windows XP for around $90, setting up a Bootcamp partition and downloading the free Windows Media Encode if your company won’t buy Episode or Squeeze.

There is absolutely nothing worth trying with Cleaner no matter which way you attempt anything.

[Chris Blair]

If you have access to a Windows system you could try this freebie:

https://www.tucows.com/preview/521321?q=Freeware+Video+Convert

You HAVE to use the presets to get it to work but I use it at home on a 5 year old, underpowered laptop and it’s very fast and does a great job encoding to a huge array of formats including WMV.

Or…theres this affordable Mac converter you can try and buy ($35) if it works.

https://www.ifunia.com/video-converter-mac.html

I’ve never used the Mac one but have a friend with a Mac that uses it at home and it does the job for him. Although loading and encoding uncompressed files might be relatively slow depending on the power of your computer.

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

[Craig Seeman]

A warning about the cheap Mac WMV encoders is that in my experience they encode to WMV8 and not WMV9

If you need inexpensive WMV9 on Mac there’s Flip4Mac (same folks who make Episode). Flip4Mac will work with the free MPEGStreamClip. This is not fast though. Fast is Squeeze for example. Bootcamp Windows XP is cheap and WME is free and fast on a file by file basis.