Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
-
Performance… yes. BitVice has never been the fastest MPEG-2 encoder on the market. And Apple’s encoder has been pretty well optimized over the last year and a half or so. Compatibility… can’t really say, as I haven’t had any real problems with either one (of the resulting encodes). Quality… this is curious to me. As I’ve said in the past, I wouldn’t use BitVice for HD sources (mainly because it either won’t accept some HD formats or because it has to use QT to scale, which isn’t that great), but for SD sources (4:3 29.97), it produces the most accurate to-the-source encodings I can get. With Apple’s encoder, I still see large and ugly aliasing and contouring artifacts. I don’t encode much 16:9 24 SD content so I couldn’t offer an opinion one way or the other there.
-
There is no technical reason that I can think of why you should be getting better results out of FCP over Compressor directly. The only thing I can think of is that you are using a self-contained file in Compressor. When creating a self-contained movie, FCP has to render out and copy every frame, which includes re-rendering your effects. For Uncompressed, this isn’t an issue, but for DVCPRO, it can be noticable. When exporting directly from FCP, it can skip this step.
BitVice is just for MPEG-2, and it is the best MPEG-2 encoder on the mac market for SD sources IMO. BitVice should do a great job of encoding your Uncompressed 8bit sources. For HD sources and MPEG-2, I really like MainConcept. And yes, both are much higher quality than Apple’s encoder.
Compression Master has a good MPEG-2 encoder. The last time I tested, it fell somewhere between Apple’s and MainConcept’s. If you like to tweak your image, then there really is no other choice on the mac as it has the best preprocessing and filtering of any software. CM also has just about every output format covered. You can probably get better FLV encoding from Squeeze, but I would never recommend anyone use it for MPEG-2 encoding (even though it does license the MainConcept Encoder, but does a terrible job enabling it).
-
Should be pretty simple to find. There is a preset already for it in Compressor 2 under the Apple presets folder called “HD DVD: HD MPEG-2 30 minutes”. The size (format) says automatic, and I think that means that it will encode to whatever size it is fed. Alternatively, you can make your own 1080 preset by creating a new setting for MPEG-2 and first choosing the format as 1080i. The difference between HDV and STD is that HDV will be encoded at the 1440 max HDV format width, and STD is encoded to square pixel 1920 wide.
-
I assume you are encoding for DVD because you mentioned BitVice.
For encoding of High-Def sources, especially to a Standard-Def size, I really like the MainConcept Mac Encoder. It is very fast and the streams it produces are very reliable. Also, if you need and require the utmost control over your image, then you really should look into Compression Master 3.1. It has a new 2-pass MPEG-2 encoder that does a pretty good job, and when combined with its preprocessing and filtering capabilities, CM 3.1 shines for HD sources.
-
What do you mean by “flaky”? Stability issues that you may be noting could be due to QT being installed and it wanting to takeover playback from the desktop. Inside of PPT, that wouldn’t be an issue. Also, make sure the extension TMPGEnc generates is .mpg, not .mpeg. Older versions of WMP don’t like that extension. Also, in ProCoder Express’ case, $50 for a good peice of encoding software like that is way underpriced.
-
In that case, there is the free TMPGEnc and the very affordable and powerful ProCoder Express ($50) from Canopus.
-
For free tools, I like ffmpegX on the mac.
-
Yes, using Compressor 2 for H.264 would be a good option, but then you have to be sure you have a system that is capable of playing back 1920×1080 H.264 at full framerate. If so, then it would offer better quality at the same bitrate. But MPEG-2 is easier to decode.
Actually, after taking a look at the Dell monitor, it is really only a 720p display. So, you could save even more bits and gain some compression efficiency by encoding to 1280×720. Also, if the source driving the display is going to be PC, then you should look into whether or not Windows Media would work best. WMV-9 would give you similar quality to H.264 and better quality than MPEG-2, while being easier to decode than H.264. Flip4Mac and Compression Master can both do good Windows Media encoding on the mac, and Canopus Procoder and Windows Media Encoder on the PC are good choices.
-
Yeah, we bought six of the LaCie Bigger Disk 1TB Extremes and having 50% of them fail for what appears to be no real reason is what I call disappointing. Now, they didn’t just die on us, as we could re-initialize the data, but obviously the original data was lost. Shortly after losing the first drive, they were then retired to only backing up other backups and as emergency sneaker net devices, so they weren’t able to create total havoc on us. But since then, two others have failed as well. And its not like these drives are getting strenuous use. I have also owned two other single disk FW800 drives from firewiredirect, and even on a completely different system there were similar errors.
-
Walter, I agree that benchmarks alone don’t necessarily guarantee anything, but are you telling me that you really don’t believe that the mac mini can handle a 11MB/s (3xDV) datarate? My iBook G3 600 could handle that rate. Again though, you do make a good point of not getting into the habit of capturing to your system disk, be it a mac mini or an iMac G5. And don’t get me started on FW800. What a disappointment it has been in real-world performance and reliabilty.