[Daniel Low]

Start with the 60 minute High Quality preset. This uses 2-pass VBR.

[Daniel Low]

Simple, use the High quality preset, only use ‘fast’ for ‘drafts’ and testing.

[Daniel Low]

Both cleaner 6 and compressor will do the job for you. Cleaner will probably take forever to do it however and the result may not work where you need it to.

[Daniel Low]

Ian,

Can you provide details of the compression settings used in DVD studio Pro?

Data rate?
CBR or VBR?
1 or 2-pass?

[Daniel Low]

Wow – huge post!
I totally appreciate what you say regarding Squeeze being a pro application, it absolutely depends on your level of expertise and your expectations. I guess the latest version of Apple iMovie or Windows Movie Maker would seem quite advanced and professional to someone coming from say a fine arts background who’s had little or no exposure to digital video.

That said, over at the DVD authoring forum it’s all talk of DVD Studio Pro and Sonic Senarist (both pro apps), not DVDit or iDVD.

In my expereince Squeeze is a very ‘dumbed-down’ transcoder, (Evidence of this is the three huge icons at the top for import file, watch folder etc) – that can be capable of very good results given the right combination of high quality source, minimal preprocessing and the right choice of codec, (and skirting around the bugs) however when given a more challenging task where one needs to get under the hood and start ‘tweeking’ it falls short.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with using it in a professional capacity but if you and I were pitching for the same transcoding job and I was using Procoder or Episode (or ever cleaner!) would you be confident of winning the job?

‘Pro’ doesn’t mean ‘difficult to use’. Episode and Procoder are simple to use and along with the included help files make it easy to get to, and understand, what the advanced features do, and what effect they’ll have. Squeeze simply lacks these features.

I hope you find these debates as healthy and interesting as I

Have a great weekend.

ps Squeeze has come to the rescue for me once or twice in the past when others have failed 😉

[Daniel Low]

Indeed there are field issues/errors in that Youtube clip, but they look worse than just failing to deinterlace would produce. It would seem like the source for the encode has gone through a number of format changes where the fields may have been ‘messed’ with. I could be wrong but the combing artefacts seen in the clip look to me as too ‘fat’ to be regular video fields.

Aharon, sorry but I have to beg to differ (again!) with regards to the quality of deinterlacers when comparing video editing software vs dedicated transcoders.

In my experience most video editing packages either drop a field or blend when deinterlacing a clip. Most decent transocders (and certainly my two favorite ones, Episode & Procoder) offer advanced motion adaptive/edge detecting methods, as well as field interpolation, along with the usual drop field and blend.

Blend nearly always produces a soft image, drop field reduces your resolution in half (it throws away half the picture). Motion adaptive and interpolation methods provide the best results.

Squeeze has, IMHO, a pretty bad deinterlacer, it’s somewhere inbetween drop field and interpolate. I’ve never had a good result when using it.

Check out this great resource on deinterlacing:
https://www.100fps.com/

[Daniel Low]

I think ‘heated discussion’ rather than a ‘war’ 😉

Episode:
https://www.flip4mac.com/episode.htm

[Daniel Low]

Aharon,

Sorry, my last post may have been unresonably harsh.

Congrats on the DVD, it must have been quite an undertaking. I know, I was approached to write a book on transcoding several years ago but after creating an outline I realised that it was going to be a mammoth task that would consume more of my life than I was willing to sacrifice at the time, and the money on offer wasn’t great either!

You say your name is at the top because you answer questions here on a daily basis, funny, I’ve been doing the same for many many years under a number of different names (the archive search shows one of my early posts from 2001!) and yet I’ve never had my name at the top, and I’ve never been asked to put it there.
I guess you need to know the right people to get your face up top!

[Daniel Low]

Roger,

I question your use of 20fps for the Youtube video. Frame rates should always be an integer division of the source frame rate. In other words if the source is 30fps then you should only use 15 and 7.5fps. If the source is 25fps then you should only use 12.5 and 6.25 etc. Anything else will result in jerky playback.

Squeeze is ok but not the greatest application out there, it may be worth downloading a trail version another transccoding application to see if the problem you have with the audio persists. I’d recommend either Episode on the Mac or Procoder on the PC.

[Daniel Low]

Aharon:
“That’s true, but you will lose quality. Video keyframes can end up in the wrong place which means the keyframe is based off what was previously an interim keyframe and now there is major degradation.”

HDV is LongGOP, I didn’t realise that all these ‘uncompressed’or lossless CODECs were too!?!! 😉
The only way to avoid the keyframe ‘issue’ you are referring to is to use a codec that doesn’t use any temporal compression. The Apple Intermediate Codec fits the bill, but seeing as you haven’t any experience of Mac you probably wouldn’t know about it, otherwise you might have recommended it in the first place.

Aharon:
“I’ve had animation compressed video be smaller than Sorenson compressed video. It depends on the footage. If you have a lossless or near lossless codec that gets the job done, use it.”

Wow! – I started working with Quicktime about 16 years ago and have always* used the Animation codec for 2d material with a tendency for large areas of flat colour, i.e. animation! (* I did go through a phase of using it for green-screen material). (Apple are pretty good at naming their codecs for the job they were designed for).
Whatever, I’ve never seen a movie compressed with the Animation codec be smaller than one compressed with the Sorenson codec, although I guess it may be possible if the material is of a stationary white cat in a snow blizzard or a black cat down a coal mine at midnight and/or you’ve totally screwed your Sorenson settings!
Sure, go for your big uncompressed i-frame only format if you have the luxury of huge amounts of storage and can afford to waste large amounts of time.

Aharon:
“I’m assuming you’ve gone into the advanced settings then, and played with those.”

Err, well, yes. That’s my job and I would never consider Squeeze an option in my professional capacity, although I’d recommend it to my mum to use for her holiday videos ;-). We were referring to why Episode is more professional than Squeeze were we not? Episode has adavanced settings where Squeeze does not, as such, Squeeze is not a pro app.

Aharon:
“Not being mac based, and not having seen the software, I will take your word for it. It does make me think seriously about getting a mac though. When you say up there with the best, what other software do you lump in with that? “

Seriously, how can you consider yourself an authority on the subjects of compression and transcoding if you have such limited experience?
I’ve reached my opinion of Episode after using it and its predecessor Compression Master, in anger, and in a professionl capacity, comparing the results with output from the likes of everything from Procoder, CarbonCoder, Compressor, FFMPEG, KulaByte etc, to the likes of Anystream, FlipFactory, Digital Rapids, Tandberg and so on.