Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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Well I’m eating my hat…
Have to say though, it really was ingenious of Autodesk and Discreet to basically not touch, talk, or do anything to the app for the past few years and let the competition gather momentum. Hopefully, 6.5 won’t be vaporware and the forever-long standing bugs plaguing 6.0.1 and 6.0.2b1 will be fixed. Otherwise, this will have been just a waste of time and they should have sold off the app when they had the chance.
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Yes, the scrubbing issue with Cleaner 6 encoded files is a known problem, and probably one that will never be fixed. You pretty much hit the nail on the head where the issues lies in the muxing.
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This is correct. I have encoded a number of 1080p24 H264s with Apple’s Compressor from high quality 1080p24 Uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2 and 10bit 4:4:4 sources, and the differences in quality between what Apple would typically achieve and what I recieve is negligible. Also, because Apple hosts some trailers that have a rather “Cooker-cutter” encoding feel to them, I would say that my results are even better than what Apple hosts in some cases. The only app I really use in this is Compressor 2. On the PC, the new MainConcept v2 H264 encoder is a welcome sight in terms of control and speed, although it does not currently encode streams compatible with Quicktime 7.
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You just need to be sure you use Windows Media Main Profile encoding at the appropriate other settings. On the mac, the two options for encoding WMVs are Flip4Mac and Popwire. Flip4Mac has a Pro QT export component that can do two pass encoding and produce very nice results ($179). The export component is compatible with Cleaner 6 and Compressor 2. Popwire has a QT single pass encoder ($29) that does a good job as well, but doesn’t offer the control that F4M does. Popwire also has a nice 2 pass WMV encoder, but it is only available with Compression Master 3 ($495), which itself is an excellent application with all of the tools it offers.
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I have to agree on ProCoder as well, in my recent tests it came out as the best software encoder for WMV9 at constrained bitrates on the PC. If cost truly isn’t an issue, then there are some hardware solutions available for real-time or faster than real-time for SD content encoding; but the price is significantly greater than just a software only app.
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This question would be better for the FCP forums, but I’ll give it a shot.
I don’t believe you can have FCP5 and 4.5 exist on the same partition. When you install FCP5 on a system that has FCP4.5 on it, FCP4.5 is automatically deleted. FCP5 has many new extensions and relies on too many libraries to be compatible with those from 4.5. So, if you want to have FCP5 and 4.5 exist on the same machine, you need to either partition your hard drive or install a second drive, and then install OS X on the second partition or drive and then FCP5 onto that disk. You could then try to copy FCP4.5 to the new partition or run FCP 4.5 from the OS with FCP5 installed and see if that works, but I doubt it.
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All I can say is that the article you linked is rather old (the date is actually from 10/18/04), and you should expect an announcement rather soon regarding full SMPTE verification.
Also, as far as VC-1 versus WMV9 HD, yes, they are not exactly the same. The available encoders today (ours included), when encoding WMV9 HD advanced profile, use the fourcc of WMVA. The fourcc code of VC-1 will be WVC1, and the effort to make the proper adjustment for previously encoded streams and encoders of today to be compliant with those in the future is very minimal (we can already encode VC-1 compliant streams in-house). At any rate, the decoders being built (either hardware or software) that support WMV9 Advanced Profile are compliant with both WMVA and WVC1 streams, at least in our testing. The only issue one may run into is with DRM, and in such case, that person or company would not likely want to use VC-1 anyway for their particular application. Most enoders like ours do not actually place any DRM restrictions on the encode itself, and a secondary application is necessary to support that. So it really is a non issue at this point for most encoders.
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QT Pro will enode all of the codecs I mentioned, other than Huffyuv. In ProCoder, look under the QT options to set the codec for Photo-JPEG.
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ProCoder is a better solution than Cleaner XL. Per the specs for efficient ProCoder encoding, I would say that a Dual P4 3.6GHz, Dual Xeon 3.4GHz, or a Dual AMD64 2.8GHz system would be a good start. At least 2GB of RAM are recommended, and a good 10K SCSI or SATA boot drive with a good 4 drive RAID would help. Aja has the Xena HS card for the PC, which is a decent performer for capturing. Note, that if you are going to capture files over SDI, then there is less likely a need to worry about QT compatibility, as you can capture uncompressed AVIs. And in such case, the free Microsoft Windows Media Encoder will do a good job for you. ProCoder will let you mark in and out points so editing beforehand is not necesary in all cases.
Encoding Windows Media at HD resolutions can be a slow process no matter what solution you choose above. As Daniel mentioned, there is the Flip4Mac WMV encoder for the mac that will encode WMV HD, however it is by far the slowest of the options. Popwire Compression Master (720p max) on the mac is another option, but it too is slower than any of the PC options. Both will give you good looking encodes, it just depends on how long you want to wait for them.
If real-time encoding over SDI or file-based content is your thing, then there is also a PCI board available from my company, Inlet Technologies. We produce a hardware/software package called Fathom that allows you encode in real-time to Windows Media (VC-1) content from almost any source to HD resolutions. Our software also allows you to contatenate tapes into one encoded file with deck control. Also, you can do what we call Seen by Scene editing, which allows you to go into an encode and mark scenes for re-encoding and only re-encode those segments, thus not having to waste the time of fully re-encoding a movie if there was an error. Email me through my profile if you would like more info.
Charles Simonson
Support and Projects Manager
Inlet Technologies
http://www.inlethd.com -
A really high-quality MPEG-1 encoder at half or three-quarters D1 can easily approach a low to mid-quality MPEG-2 encoder at the same resolution any day. Unless you are embedding full-resolution video into your Powerpoint, then there is no need to use MPEG-2. There is even less need to use MPEG-2 if you can not control where the .ppt will be played back from.