[Ben Waggoner]

Well, I wouldn’t go THAT far. A couple of points:

1. Telestream will be closing the gap, with our help. And it’s not that huge a gap right now, especially for the majority of users who don’t touch registry keys. If anything, Flip4Mac is easier to use for most consumers – you need registry keys to turn on B-frames on Windows today, for example.

2. Running Windows on a Mac running Boot Camp is just the same as running on any other Windows machine. Parallels will give the same quality, but not the same performance single it only supports a single core.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Nope, it won’t run in Crossover, since Crossover hasn’t implemented the wmvencod.dll.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Windows Media Encoder and ProCoder both use the same version of the codec on the system, so you’ll get the same quality out of the codec either way. That said, I think ProCoder has better preprocessing most of the time.

Bootcamp or Parallels won’t make a quality difference. However if you’re on a multicore machine, you’re better off in Bootcamp, since Parallels only allows a single thread to run in Windows.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

All three apps use the same underlying code, which is currently behind the current Windows implmentation (although we’re working with Telestream to close that gap). That said, these are the more esoteric stuff exposed via registry keys – only high-end customers would even notice the difference.

The full list of Flip4Mac products is here:

https://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Nate,

Note Flip4Mac is a great solution, but it doesn’t have all the latest and greatest modes of our latest Windows codec. But we continue to work with Telestream to continually enhanced the product.

The same underlying codec powers WMV encoding in both Sorenson Squeeze and Episode Pro, so it’s really a question of the right workflow.

Also, the cheap version of Flip4Mac only offers some presets. You need to pay more for more control or HD encoding.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

1280x720x50 is a lot of pixels per second – a mid-range machine could have troubles.

Things that can improve performance:

Use WMP11, which has a faster decoder
Use Vista, which is faster yet
Turn on DXVA for GPU-accelerated decode if there’s a compatible GPU installed.

[Ben Waggoner]

What format, codec, and data rate are you targeting?

[Ben Waggoner]

Make sure you’re using the slowest, highest quality resizing/scaling mode. Moire is a typical result of doing a big scale amount with a fast, low-quality scaling algorithm.

[Ben Waggoner]

What frame size and data rate are you targeting? The fps don’t matter that much themselves – it’s about fps * height * width.

[Ben Waggoner]

The ProCoder demo verison is ancinet at this point, and predates HDV. The current released version does HDV just fine.

I honestly don’t know if I even have a copy of Cleaner XL installed anywhere anymore. Other tools have long since replaced it as my go-to products. My current suite of general compression tools are ProCoder/Carbon, Squeeze, and Episode. Although I only wind up doing the hard stuff these days, so a sad portion of my work winds up being in After Effects, VirtualDub, and WMcmd.vbs :).

Also, you’re missing a great upgrade in Premiere Pro 2.0 from 1.5.1.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html