ULEAD Announces *New* MPEG Codec!

[Jerry Jones]

http://www.digitalproducer.com/2002/01_jan/news/01_21/cw_ulead_mpeg_now.htm

This is exciting news! Direct, real-time encoding to MPEG from Firewire is coming!!

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Dr Mordrid]

And not to mention that they are *finally* getting out from under the limitations of the Ligos encoding engine. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Dr. Mordrid

[paulw]

I wonder if it can be retrofitted to existing MSPRO products??

[Sciascia]

The million dollar question is "will it be available as an update or patch for current MSP6/6.5 users?" The other question of course is can they do it better than Ligos? Ligos has a lot of experience designing MPEG encoding products, can they do a better job than them?

I wish that they had made the mpEGG encoder capable of doing capture, it is almost realtime and the quality is outstaanding in my opinion. CCE is the best encoder (SW) out there that I have seen.

[Dr Mordrid]

Ligos may be experienced, but that's no measure of quality products. Just look at F.O.R.D.

I knew about the firewire-to-DV coming, but couldn't mention it due to my NDA. I did not know about the new codecs being a Ulead product, but when you anaylze their experience with Ligos it's not exactly a shocker.

I think they felt VERY BURNED by the problems with GoMotion in MSPro 6.0 and 6.5.

What I can say is that is is far from the last suprise from Ulead

Dr. Mordrid

[AndrewDV]

Originally posted by Sciascia
The million dollar question is "will it be available as an update or patch for current MSP6/6.5 users?"

I really would like to know this one as well. After the upgraditis of DVD-Plugin, MSP6.5 (included plugin, but released after the separate package), to DVD-Factory (released after MSP6.5 and no upgrade option for plugin owners), I'm a bit concerned about cost. They seem to be pulling a 'Microshaft' as of late with their releases. If it is not a free patch to MSP6.5 (or DVD-Factory) users, will it be included with the MSP7 upgrade?

[BrianP]

What is the difference between the 6.0 and 6.5 encoder? Superior? Worse? Same?

How does it compare to other Ligos offerings (LSX or the Premiere plug-in)?

[Sciascia]

Supposedly the Ligos engine is a little better in MSP6.5, but with this news I would wait to see how the implementation is intended, i.e., patches or MSP7.0 (is this true, they just released 6.5!)

[Jerry Jones]

Looks like Creative Pro also has the news release, but it adds nothing to the one published on Digital Media Net:

http://www.creativepro.com/story/news/15475.html

[wkulecz]

Is it really a codec?

Is it really a codec? Meaning it could be used by any OpenDML/VfW application? (like avi_io)

As far as I know the only mpeg codec was from Dariam (sp?) and when I demo'd it a few years ago it was terrible!

--wally.

[Hulk]

I hope they can at least match the quality of the current Ligos compressor. I would think that they have analyzed the code and know what to do.

I wonder if the 7.0 upgrade will be an "upgrade" disk or will install by itself. If not installation on a fresh system could be a real pain. Load 6.5, insert 6.0 disk for verification, then load 7.0. Then there's all the crazy patching that would have to be done...

Ahhhhh!

[farid]

This is good news for users with analog capture cards -seen the 7500 AIW on Tom's yesterday?- but can anyone shed some light as if transcoding from DV to MPEG would be of use for editing ?

VV3 for example -I know, I'm sold- can do realtime editing on DV footage using their own codec. Why would I want to use an MPEG codec instead of a (decent) DV codec except to gain some disk space ? I also doubt that realtime editing will truly be possible using MPEG codecs, at least not when some effects and a couple of layers are thrown in the ring. That now seems possible with DV codecs.

Where I do see light however is authoring : if you wanna put your DV-based tapes on DVD disk MPEG.Now can save you some time by doing realtime transcoding (think of all these poor bastards still making VCDs right now).

Farid

[Jerry Jones]

Farid:

It *isn't* so much that we want this new feature so we can *edit* in MPEG-2!

No - the reason is we can continue to *edit* in DV and - when finished - export the entire project to DV tape and then *capture* the entire *edited* production to a single MPEG-2 file... in real time.

So a one-hour DV production would only take one hour to encode to MPEG-2.

Currently, we must *transcode,* which takes much longer.

That's why this new feature is so attractive.

Granted, the existing Ligos GoMotion codec allow us to capture from *analog* sources in real time, but not from Firewire.

So this new feature will be particularly helpful to videographers who are using Firewire boards.

[Hulk]

Jerrold -

Wouldn't it seem logical that this new, fast MPEG compression would be available using the normal "create" command? It would seem crazy for Ulead to make the user create a project, print to tape, and then capture the project MPEG just to quickly encode to MPEG using the new compression scheme.

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes....it's my interpetation that this system would replace the Ligos plugin for MPEG creation and analog capture plus add the IEEE-1394 capture option.

Dr. Mordrid