Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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I haven’t done much with HDV and FCP 5 yet, but I would imagine the best method is to export a reference movie first, then use this for compressing. You will have to eventually recompress, because DVD-Video discs can only have video sized at 720×480 and lower for NTSC. For the fastest MPEG-2 software encoder that I know to be available on the mac, take a look at the MainConcept Encoder. Its quality is significantly better than Compressor or QT as well.
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While I won’t deny that the iMac G5 is a much better choice for budget editing than a mac mini, the statement that the hard drive on the mac mini is almost too slow to capture DV is ridiculous. In fact, there is more than enough bandwidth to easily capture three simultaneous streams of DV at the same time if it were possible. DV’s datarate comes no where near the max throughput of the mac mini’s hard drive. And anyway, lets face it, no matter what machine you are going to buy, you will need some extra storage. Including with an iMac, because it too can only hold one hard drive (although its hard drive can be much larger), and we all know how much video can eat up disk space.
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On the PC, there is the free Windows Media Encoder, and there is the paid Camtasia Studio. Both do a good job for most projects.
On the mac, there is Ambrosia Software’s SnapzProX, a great utility. Probably the best thing to do, but maybe not possible because your content is gaming based (is it a computer or console game, and if computer, does it use OpenGL?), is to buy a hardware card like a cheap DeckLink board and use its Desktop video output feature to a SDI device to recapture it back in at full Uncompressed glory.
While these solutions should work at least somewhat in all cases, I still don’t understand why you want to upres the content when editing it. Seems pointless to upres at the editing stage.
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BTW, good to see another fellow from LSU on here. Email me through my profile if you need anymore assistance.
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I think Final Cut Studio is well worth the update for Compressor 2 and encoding HD (but I would probably still hold off on using FCP5 for awhile). Encoding MPEG-2 at HD sizes in Compressor 2 is much more efficient than it was in version 1. A couple of other tools have good MPEG-2 HD encoders, such as Canopus ProCoder 2 on the PC and Compression Master 3 on the mac. Squeeze’s MPEG-2 encoding is terrible even though it supports HD MPEG-2 encoding.
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At 320×240, 4 hours should be doable with either WMV-9 or H.264. At 640×480, you are looking at 2 to 2.5 hours. If you are targetting a more general audience however, then you are pretty much limited to a codec that you know they will have, which would be MPEG-1. MPEG-1 at 320×240 will look good enough for most projects and can fit around 1.25 to 1.5 hours on a CD, but limiting it to 1 hour would be best.
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You would do best for the near term to just download the free Windows Media Encoder from Microsoft. If you feel like spending some money, then ProCoder 2 would be an excellent choice.
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If your source is VHS, then encode to 352×480. That is not a typo. Trust me on this, it is the recommended way of encoding VHS quality video to MPEG-2 for DVD. Plus, at that size, you can keep your bitrates down lower and fit a lot more onto a DVD-5.
The highest quality encoder on the mac for encoding MPEG-2 is BitVice by Innobits. The fastest encoder (by far) is the MainConcpet encoder. And its quality is second best on the mac IMHO.
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Animation is an Uncompressed codec, and PNG is a comrpessed codec, so Animation should be better. If using PNG, you want to use the None filter.
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I agree with Ben’s recommendation for using Compression Master 3 and MPEG-4 as the format. It will look a lot better than your encodes from QT Pro using Apple’s MPEG-4 encoder. CM also has an excellent Real Media encoder, which would do a great job with your animation files.