Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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I wouldn’t use either Squeeze, Compressor, or Cleaner for MPEG-1 becuase of bugs and incompatibilities. On the mac, I would recommend checking out either Compression Master 4, MainConcept, or even ffmpegX.
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Unless you have a lot of tapes to encode from and they are sourced from film-based material, purchasing a hardware MPEG-2 encoder does not have much value these days IMO. Compressor 2 and MainConcept have very good encoders on the mac, and I would suspect you would get more value by purchasing a powerful PC and installing ProCoder 2 (best MPEG-2 encoding) on it than just a buying single-format card.
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Also, you will need to make note of what the maximum resolution the pc can put out to the display. Even though the display’s resolution is 1366×768, most of the time for HDTVs the max they can read from a computer is 1280×768. My Samsung is like this, no matter the connection type used. (Even though the computer resolution to the display is only 1280×768, the picture is displayed correctly and there are no black bars on the sides.)
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If you are using Squeeze on a PC, then I would go with WMV. On a mac, then I would go with either Real or MPEG-4 part 2.
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Instead of capturing as DV, I would recommend capturing as MJPEG. I find the quality of MJPEG to be better than DV when exporting the final sequence and transcoding to a compressed format.
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Being that Compressor won’t do a proper 1080i to 720p conversion, I would recommend that you encode to 1080i. Especially if this will be displayed at 63″. I assume you will be playing this back from a computer, so bit rate really isn’t an issue. Just use what ever max bit rate you can afford to be able to play back in realtime on your system.
Most likely, that plasma display is going to deinterlace the vertical resolution of 1080i first to 540p, and then it will scale the horizontal and vertical resolutions to match its native resolution. If Compressor could do a proper 1080i29.97 to 720p59.94 (converting each field to a progressive frame while scaling), then encoding 720p would be recommended, but since it does not, I would stay with 1080i.
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I wonder if some codec of filter is installed on your system that is incorrectly taking over the decoding of your movie?
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Have you tried non-clustered encodes? I wouldn’t recommend multi-noded encoding with Compressor for a few reasons, one of which is because the MPEG-2 encoder is quite speedy on both a G5 and MBP already that it isn’t really necessary. The only application of which clustering is useful with Compressor is CBR H.264 encoding.
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In Compressor, I try to always leave the Motion Estimation settings to Auto and encode with two-pass VBR, as this will output the best quality encode. I have found way too many bugs with Compressor’s motion estimation routines to even think about manually controling them.
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As well, ProCoder Express may be exactly what you are looking for. It has many of the features that its big brother has (the DV portion will definitely have you covered) for a lot less. I don’t recall its batch capabilities however.
Also, MainConcept sells a good DV encoder for only $49.