Beware of Ulead update!

[kwmarriott]

If you are creating any low bitrate movies for VCD or SVCD beware of instaling the latest patch for Ulead MediaStudio Pro 6.5. Ulead have replaced the Ligos mpeg encoder with their own Mpeg.Now codec and at low bitrates it is atrocious..Really very blocky and has artifacts even around static objects. Lots of people have complained on the Ulead forum but it appears Ulead are going to use this codec in MediaStudio 7.0 and if they do I am sure they will lose a lot of customers.

[jeff b]

The 6.51a Power Patch has not met with 100% glowing reviews on this bbs, either, with the exception of using it to make higher bitrate DVD's. In that wise, it's actually a good update. But in my case, I'd rather stay with 6.5 until they can figure out why all my DV projects trip my Sony camcorder's copy protection when I play them off the timeline. A couple of other people here have also had that problem, which Ulead tech support is working on at this point. There are also two or three threads that ran their course here on that subject, if you're interested.

Have you or anyone you know contacted Ulead tech support regarding the poorer quality on low bitrate MPEG?

Jeff B

[wkulecz]

I never thought the Ligos encoder in MSP did very good on VCD or SVCD. While having the new one be worse is not a good thing, IMHO you should be using TMPGEnc for VCD and SVCD instead anyways. The improvements in NTSC-DVD encoding over Ligos are obvious.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

IMO the reported problems are so inconsistant as to be system specific.

I'm getting excellent results with the new encoder both in SVCD and DVD. It's also MUCH better when compositing titles or other overlay effects as it antialiases the edges much better than Ligos ever did.

Don't do VCD anymore anyhow.

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

I still need 2-3 minute clips for powerpoint presentations from time to time. VCD format MPEG plays nicely on Macs and PCs
I've not found anything better than TMPGEnc for this, but I haven't spent a great deal of time trying as what I have now makes all concerned very happy.

I don't understand how low bitrate mpeg encoding could be system specific -- or have application vendors figured out how to make W2K go down the road to DLL-hell of win9x? There is no excuse for this! With multi-gigabit hard drives and W2K's "private, or side-by-side" DLL loading there is no reason for applications to run with other than the DLLs they were developed against!

--wally.

[wkulecz]

Situation where MPEG.now seems to fall down!

Brightly lit scenes seem to show pulsing artifacts until the overall brightness crosses below a threshold.

Most of my stuff is overall pretty dark because of the nature of the events which is probably why I've not noticed these artifacts before now.

Doc, try MPEG.now on some of the beach scenes where you mention the Panasonic MPEG1 encoder does much better than most. I'll wager you see MPEG.now fall down too!

I'm authoring an MSP6.5 Ligos encoded version of the file now, I'll report back as to if it cures the pulsing artifacts in these bright scenes.

--wally.

[wkulecz]

ligos encoding cured pulsing artifacts!

Artifacts are clearly visible in the MPEG.now file when played in media player, same sections of the file encoded with the old Ligos is free from these "pulsing artifacts"

IMHO MPEG.now looks better than Ligos in areas where the overall brightness is low enough to not trigger the artifacts.

Clearly its not motion as I see these on some stills, others have suggested "high detail" but I see the artifacts dissapear with a zoom that brings in more detail but cuts out bright areas bringing down the overall brightness.

This needs to be fixed or a run time option added to choose Ligos or MPEG.now for encoding.

--wally.