Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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On the mac, you’re limited to either Flip4Mac or Compression Master 3. If you need to output HD resolution WMVs, then I would go with F4M. If you will be downconverting for the web, then I would suggest Compression Master as it has excellent pre-processing capabilities. The problem you have is mainly that you are using the DVCPRO HD codec, which isn’t uniformly available for cheap on the PC. But, if you converted your DVCPRO HD material to an uncompressed or less-lossy codec, then you have more options. On the PC, Canopus ProCoder is an excellent choice for encoding Windows Media.
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Its the data rate, which lends itself to the overall final size that is causing this. I don’t know what resolution you are encoding at, but I will let you know that I often encode to 368×208 at 900kbps, and my encodes look fantastic. I use Compression Master’s MPEG-4 Part 2 encoder, but you should be able to get very similar results with Sorenson Video 3, if you have the Pro version and are doing a 2-pass VBR, which it sounds like you are. The one tip I have is, instead of doubling your rate for the peak, set that lower to something like 1800-2000 for a 1100-1200 target encode. At 900, I use a peak of 1600, which gives enough bits to the scenes that need it with out taking away too much from the scenes that don’t.
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I agree that it is a bit insane, but if you are delivering to a client, you should probably be compressing to a square PAR any way. If you are compressing to anamorphic MPEG-2, QT will display MPEG-2 at the proper IAR. If you aren’t compressing and delivering the source as a file, when the movie is placed in a proper application, like FCP, then it will display at the correct IAR as well.
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What do you mean it doesn’t like Program Streams? As an input or output format? I wouldn’t use Squeeze to encode for MPEG-2, as there are much better MPEG-2 encoders on both the mac and PC. But the differences in program and elementary streams is that elementary streams are the video and audio streams seperated for use in authoring apps, while a program stream has the audio and video streams multiplexed into a single file for better distribution.
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You can “fake” the display resolution of an anamorphic QT by selecting the Sizing parameter under Get Properties and manually resizing the image to the desired ratio.
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The QuickTime MPEG-2 export component that was included with FCP4 and DVD SP2 is not the same as the exporter included with FCP5 and DVD SP4. It has been re-engineered to offer much better performance and quality, especially on two passes. Other good alternatives on the mac include MainConcept, Compression Master 3, and BitVice.
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Cleaner 6.0.2 or lower is not compatible with the new codecs QT7 brings to the table. This includes H.264. You will need to upgrade to Cleaner 6.5 for QT7 compatibility, and even that is suspect. Rather than wasting your money on a Cleaner 6.5 upgrade, I would recommend Compression Master 3, Squeeze 4, or even Compressor 2. Compressor 2 and Compression Master 3 will give you your best H.264 results on a mac.
And the audio problem with Cleaner is that Cleaner has poor MPEG-4 encoders and doesn’t link well to the MPEG-4 encoders from QT6. If you absolutely needed to know a solution however, the best thing to do is encode the audio first with QT Pro and then save a reference source movie with the original video track and the new audio track. Use this in Cleaner and for the audio option choose “copy”.
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The only answer is to not use Squeeze for any MPEG encoding (of any type)! Squeeze has a very weak implementation of the MainConcept encoder. Better options exist in the encoders from ProCoder, Compressor, Compression Master, BitVice, and the stand-alone MainConcept encoders.
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VP6 is slow, very slow. It is also only single processor aware, so the speeds you are experiencing are normal. Of note, I have encoded some content with VP6, and while the quality was very good, it took 60x on a 2.6GHz Dual (not that it mattered) Opteron (HD Source).
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If you are going to mix the HDV to DV material with other DV native material (or print to a DV tape), then you should adjust the field to lower. If your entire project is going to use HDV material downconverted to DV and your final output is going to be for DVD or the web, then it would likely be best to leave the fields same as source.