[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

Well, i’m also curious what other professionals use, but my concern with the try it all method is that each program has their own learning curve, and I cant trust that I can master it in a short period of time while also juggling delivery of actual work to clients.

But personally my experience is this so far:

Compressor – My go to, the custom settings I’ve created work well and I always try new things here first.

AME- Really don’t like the interface, seem to get consistently poor quality encodes.

Episode – Just started casually using it. love the UI. and the settings seem to go very deep.

Sorenson – Used an old version a bit because it came bundled with Avid MC. the new UI seems fine but I have no practical experience.

Bitvice and CCE-MP seem to be the two best in class standalone MPEG-2 encoders. I would definitely buy bitvice if it will help. Does anyone have practical experience with either vs the other big tools?

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

Thanks guys, I really needed that to.

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

thanks. unfortunately the images were over 500KB per. so it wouldn’t allow me to upload them. my mistake, I should have mentioned that.

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

The first two are theirs

https://www.flickr.com/photos/andres_mlo/sets/72157626407552440/

it resized the images a bit, what is a better image host?

So you see, I have poor color reproduction, some haloing around the letters and artifacting around the ‘museum of arts and design’ logo element.

the VBR thing is something i will keep in mind, but in this situation, despite clustering I had a set data rate that stuck to.

besides clearly higher production values, it looks like the other company set key frames at 15 bumped the data rate up to 5259 (??) and only did a single pass (?). also they put it at 23.98 FPS which we were specifically asked not to do, but that would technically increase their per frame data rate. although that can’t be the answer.

I’ll try running the settings over the weekend.

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

@ Jason Thanks for the tip about the GOP. i was under the impression that extending the GOP (and leaving it open) simply allowed the file to be compressed more and had no significant impact on the look. most of what i need to do MPEG 2 compression for is sit down interview DVDs. any suggestions on settings?

and the CompressHD. I don’t know if I do enough H.264 work to justify the speed, I don’t have a slot in the Mac Pro, and quite frankly, I resent that I have to pay more money for something I feel like I should be able to do in software.

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

Do you know the Times Sq area? An organization called CEMUSA,they outfitted newsstands with 2X2 55″ LCDS on the back (street facing), and one vertical 65″ on each of the sidewalk facing sides.

These silly things:
https://en.ooh-tv.com/2010/09/14/usa-first-cemusa-digital-newsstand-installed-in-september/

Everything coming out of AE looks great but i’m sure what’s happening is that i’m robbing the encoder of the ability to see what the separate elements are that make up the motion graphics. So for example AE knows when a graphic is a vector and can wait till the last second to render and encode it. When I output lossless and THEN encode, the encoder only sees a single image and encodes it as such. This in my mind is part of what is leading to the artifacting (esp. around edges). I would imagine it’s like the difference between making a collage and then taking a picture of the collage once you’ve made it.

As I mentioned i outputted lossless, zero compression, no audio. 5.6GB for 30 secs. I couldn’t even play it smoothly it was so large. do you think going ProRess in that situation would be a better option than lossless? I have not tried that route.

And yes i can make things look good out of AE sometimes. usually it’s in DVCProHD is where i get good results. it’s just that compression control options seem so LIMITED in AE (even compared to Adobe Media Encoder). So I can make things look good in AE, it’s just that I can make them look a lot better elsewhere.

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

@Craig Sheeman I did a search and not only pulled up the 2009 version but the 2010 as well. However it’s hosted on the Telestream site and is specifically for Episode, was that the one that you were referring to? It looks like a really great, straight forward overview of standards, and best practices. Looking forward to reading it.

https://www.telestream.net/pdfs/user-guides/Simple-Encoding-Recipes-2010.pdf

and i’ll check out the Compress HD review.

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

Thank you very much. I was having that exact issue and your answer helped me solve the problem without any hair-pulling. Can’t believe it was so easy…

Andres

[Andres Lopez-ovejero]

Hi guys.

i’ve been having tremendous trouble with the same issue, and this thread has been very useful. but i’ve tried Boris, photoshop, you name it. And i’ve been keeping my text at 92% black and 95% opacity.

actually am using the time*[0,-120] formula right now to bang out a credit roll that has had me pulling my hair out for days. thank you so much for explaining WHERE to insert the expression formula, although the Mercury Jones formula created and error in AE (CS4). any suggestions on that?

Actually… nope, for the hundreth time, no go on the credit roll. I am however reviewing the content on an LCD, but i’m exporting to an M2v to try to compensate and my clients will be watching the video on dvd players in their computers anyway….

any help appreciated!

Andres