Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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Without a doubt, the tool you want to use for compressing Real media in almost all cases on all platforms is Popwire Compression Master 3.1. The quality is excellent, and the encoding speed is very fast.
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One of the bugs in Compressor 2… What you need to do is start without a source file loaded, then choose to create a new setting. Then quit Compressor, and restart Compressor. Now you should be able to edit the setting’s parameters and save them.
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That’s correct, but if you really want to use the camera as an acquisition tool (not really recommended, DV is better in most cases), then I would suggest getting to know MPEG StreamClip on the mac. It’s free and does a excellent job handling most MPEG formats and quickly being able to convert them to editable formats like Uncompressed video.
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Yes, I wouldn’t apply a deinterlace filter in an NLE because almost all that I have seen are not that high quality. Especially the filter included with FCP, and even most of the paid filters you can buy for FCP aren’t that great when compared to those in compression suites. Compression Master and Canopus ProCoder have excellent deinterlacing filters. Squeeze’s is pretty lackluster, and Compressor 2’s can be buggy.
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If you’re going to deinterlace, I wouldn’t do it in an editing app like FCP. Wait until the encoding stage to do so (with either Cleaner, CM, or Compressor). As far as comparisons with CM and Squeeze, I really do believe CM is a much stronger product. Squeeze does have excellent Flash Video encoding, and can use the F4M encoder, but beyond that I rarely find myself even running Squeeze. The preprocessing and filtering, along with its highly optimized encoders, makes Compression Master a very nice piece of software.
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Yeah, that’s a good point Craig on the importing of WMVs in order to transcode. For some reason that eluded me, but I have found myself in that situation in the past (I used CM for it, but the F4M Importer and QT Pro would have worked as well). F4M Studio Pro and Compressor is a nice option, as long as you don’t run into any of the Compressor bugs or need detailed image control.
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WMV Studio Pro ($179) is a really nice product. The two-pass encoding and HD features are good to have on the mac. I don’t know how helpful the Importer is (other than allowing you can scroll through frame-by-frame) as being able to edit already heavily compressed files without a pass-through save option is pretty much meaningless for distribution. If they can make pass-through editing and saving of imported WMVs to exported WMVs, then it will have some real value. The playback of WMVs with QT doesn’t offer that great enough of a benefit framerate-wise over WMP, so it also would be great if F4M could get real-time playback of HD working as well. And, the lack of any kind of DRM import support can be glaring. Though, this really isn’t an issue of F4M, more to do with Microsoft.
WMV Studio Standard ($99) is, on the other hand, possibly overpriced compared to Popwire’s Exporter ($29) according to your needs. If you aren’t going to use the Importer, and don’t need to use the encoder in Compressor 2 or Squeeze 4.1 (the other apps Craig mentions work fine with the Popwire product), then you will have basically the same product for much less. And the single-pass Popwire Exporter is generally much faster in encoding times (I will admit that I haven’t extensively tested this in a few months though) than the single-pass F4M encoder.
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Sounds like Squeeze doesn’t recognize your audio file. Is the lack of audio encoding options the same for all encoders in Squeeze? Are you using one of the FLV presets? You can also select alternate audio sources (like a second audio file) in Squeeze if need be.
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DV will not look good blown up to HD resolution. The only work-around is to redraw the lines thicker. So, the lines are 1 pixel thick now, they will need to be 3 or 4 pixels thick for this project. This may not be possible for the given content however.
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Yes, either Photo-JPEG for progressive, Motion-JPEG for interlaced, or Animation for alpha channel content. If you need alphas, but Animation is too much, then try PNG.