what mpeg2 encoder should I be using

[Kris1]

... LItterally it means "I beg you". But it can also be "Please Do", or even "please NO" depending on context.

But I second that one. Procoder 2.0 is pretty amazing. I've done 3+ hour projects with it that look better than 2 hour projects out of Mainconcept 1.42. Even a friend of mine who owns a RTx.100 couldn't believe the quality that Procoder turned out under those circumstances. And on my AMD64 (oc'ed to 3700+ levels), I've seen the standalone version do high quality conversions at 2.1x Realtime. Unsurprisingly, the Premiere plugin is considerably slower of course.

It's funny how all of a sudden, most people now agree the MSP7.0 version of Mainactor isn't that hot quality wise. When I critisized it a year ago, most people here reacted as if I was out of my head. Yet even back then, the encoding quality of CSP (even CSP Basic), Procoder 1.5 and even older hardware cards like the DV500 were totally superiour to the one found in MSP7.0, especially in terms of motion prediction and image noise during complex image changes.

The current Mainactor encoder has recitified a lot, and considering the price tag the quality difference in "bad situations" between the excellent Mainactor and the out-of-league Procoder shouldn't surprise anyone. Under "normal" condidtions, there's still a noticable difference in image quality but not nearly as pronounced.

[DJ]

Hey Kris1, I was looking for a response on the LE board to this question. How does hardware encoders compare with software encoders. Reason I ask is that currently I have to wait a long time for renders for two hour projects and if hardware quality is good it might be simpler to just capture to mpeg2. BTW are you saying that Procoder 2.0 is better than CSP and what settings do you use for three hour project?

DJ

[Dr Mordrid]

Consumer hardware capture encoders can't encode with the quality that software encoders do nor do they offer the level of control. Professional ones are a different matter, but they aren't cheap.

Also: with todays CPU's many software encoders can encode with higher quality settings than hardware and still do it at or faster than realtime. MainConcepts is great at this.

On my slowest system (AthlonXP 2400+) it encodes DV to DVD compliant MPEG-2 @5500 kbps with enhanced motion compensation and quality settings and still does it slightly faster than realtime.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

I agree with DrM. In addition, software codecs offer a better flexibility and upgradeability. The latter is especially important, as some software encoders are improved every few months. Some hardware encoders may not even be upgradeable.

To respond to Kris, it is true that the MSP7 encoder, which is now nearly two years old, was state-of-the-art at the time of its release, but there have been two major improvements in the MC encoder since then, which have not been released to MSP users (possibly a question of royalties???), but which are available on more recent products. By this, I don't intend to say that future MC versions won't be better still. However, I think you are confused about what we are talking about. We are talking about the MC Windows MPEG Encoder 1.4.2, not MainActor, which is an NLE product. Actually, if I can get my Linux computer working a little more stably, I'd like to try the Linux version of MainActor. At the moment, I'm having a problem with it.

Incidentally, unless I'm mistaken, ProCoder costs nearly four times more than MC MPEG Encoder!

'Je t'en prie', as a response to 'merci', is equivalent to 'not at all' or 'it's nothing' to 'thank you'. IOW, it's a polite formula.

[Kris1]

Hi Brian, Dr M, DJ.

Sorry, I did indeed write "Mainactor", when I was refering to MainConcept. As both are the product of the same company, a pretty obvious and easy to make mistake for a feeble-minded person like myself. :-) And by the way, dying wouldn't scare me half as much if I knew your last statement to be true, Brian.

That said, it seems logical the Mainactor's mpeg encoder will be identical to their own -Mainconcept- product to a large extend : which doesn't do away with the fact I missed the ball here.

*rant mode on - be warned - do not read if you have better things to do in your life, like saying "I love you" to your wife, or walking the dog, or even watering the plants while raining*

DJ,

As for hardware VS. software, yes, DJ, I can't be more sarcastic about LE's mpeg quality without the risk of being banned over at Pinnacles board, but I agree -like most people- you'd have to step up to a very high price league in terms of hardware encoders to beat the flexibility and quality of today's top software encoders (CSP and Procoder). As stated, Procoder2.0 needed 95 minutes to create the necessary streams from a 3:12 Hours long DVD on my AMD64. And believe it or not, the thing looks _bloody brilliant_ on a simple, low cost single layer 4.7 DVD-R. And THAT'S the kind of situations where you can clearly see the difference between Mainconcept and Procoder in my experience. Granted, the thing was shot using a DSR250 or something comparable, but even so.

Under "normal" situations (90 minutes DVD), I still can see quality differences between MC and Procoder, but not as pronoucned. For the record, we used the before mentioned RTx100 to see what it would make of it, and the Procoder output was better in evey aspect. If you need more details on this, look up my email-adress in my Pinnacle-profile, I'll be glad to help you if you'd need it.

But for LE, the omnission of a usable plugin port, and the absense of a workable frame server means you'd be condemned to output to an export AVI first which you could then reprocess in a standalone encoder. I could've lived with that 5 years ago. At this day and age, I'm not so forgiving anymore.

I would not really dare making quality statements over CSP and Procoder. To me, I found they both are excellent and pretty comparable. But I can't shake the _highly subjective_ idea, Procoders' motion prediction works slightly better than CSP's.

That said, I hope it has become clear why I've hammering so hard on the fact Pinnacle refuses to build a usable Premiere/Ppro compliant plugin port for LE ever since Edition 5 came out ? Look at MSP, or Premiere users : Mpeg encoder not good enough ? Find a better one that fits your needs (and budget). I'm not sure how many different frameservers there are for both MSP and Premiere, but I've seen NONE for LE so far. Premiere and Ulead users have a problem of choise. LE users have the problem of not having any choise at all.

If LE would have a usable plugin-interface, all these quality issues with LE and DVD generation would be moot and meaningless, and that's really sad because LE's a pretty amazing piece of software once you get the hang of it. But sadly, I must judge the package by its output-quality-ability, and in that term, LE's _lame_. Realworld example : let us pretend LE5.5 would have a plugin-port that functions : you could buy something like CPS-Basic and be totally happy with both the speed and quality of the mpeg2 output. Well, you can't.

Instead, Pinnacle chooses to let you PAY 199$ for features you didn't ask for, and those which were promissed a long time ago. (a "better mpeg2 routine" was promissed first between 4.5 and 5.0 but discarded because "not ready", then after 5.0 to 5.5, and NOW it would come with 6.0 ; essentially, you're paying twice for what you should've gotten first time round). To add insult to injury : we _still_ don't know if the new routine is so much better. Blurbs like "significantly improved speed and quality" are _totally meaningless_ in the real world, wouldn't you agree ? Knowing Pinnacle's track record for bending the truth, are you prepared to pay 199$ on their promise the new encoder's better ? Well it couldn't possibly be worse now could it ?

When Pinnacle changed the rules and dropped Adobe, I warned all Pinnacle users that in spite of the promise of "freedom through software NLE" this could very much result in a closed-box NLE-system, totally protected by Pinnacle and causing the users to dish out money again and again and again for each new feature and -God forbid- bug Fix. Kind like the Macrosystem boxes. (Cassablanca, Kron, Prestige). In essense, that's EXACTLY what this whole LE thing is about : the customer, and especially the so-called "loyal" customer become hostage of Pinnacle's marketing strategy, and THEY will determine what you can do for which price, because you can NOT, like with Adobe or Ulead products, use major 3th party plugins (or at least, not the extend you can with the first 2 I mentioned) to compensate for shortcoming of the main product.

Any ex-user of a DC, Pro-One, Pro-One RT, Nitro ..... will tell you, Pinnacle does NOT reward customer-loyalty. In fact, they do quite the opposite.

You yourself have noticed the way LE's castrated (DV-out discussion), and you have also indicated you know perfectly well why this happens ("...pissing of Silver clients"). But this means that no matter what, LE will _never_ be completly on par with other manufacturers products simply BECAUSE the others do not have to worry about "cramming too much features in a lower product to avoid loosing income". Stuff like MSP, PPro are programmed without those kinds of company-interest-inspired boundaries.

In other words, Premiere will probably remain my first choise for editing, closely followed by the now aging MSP7.0, which in my vision is still as close to a NLE equivalent of a swiss-army-knife as I've seen. Castrated by Pinnacle, LE falls somewhere inbetween, which considering the programs' potential, is a ***-damn shame.

*rant mode off*

Sorry guys. Needed to let off some steam.

[Dr Mordrid]

Don't forget my post about the upcoming MSP7 Service Pack and that a sucessor is in the works.

Dr. Mordrid

[Kris1]

... with your trackrecord, I've no troubles believing you, DrM, but the trouble with Ulead has always been their NLE packages aren't exactly money-earning machines for them, hence I question it's that high on their priority list.

I hope the service pack patches up the encoder to latest standards (DVDWS 2.2 level or something similar).

But yeah, I would like the idea of a MSP-on-steroids very, very much. In fact, it's high time Ulead finaly puts the GUI of MSP to rest : I'm 100% sure many people remain ignorant about MSP because they're blinded by a GUI that looks and feels exactly like the one used on MSP2.5 under Windows 95.

[paulw]

Originally posted by Brian Ellis


Incidentally, unless I'm mistaken, ProCoder costs nearly four times more than MC MPEG Encoder!

'

US$59.95 for Procoder Express

[DJ]

Long rant there Kris. A few points. I got LE for $55.00 total in that offer that was too good to pass up. After a few weeks totally miffed by the UI I finally figured it out and started using it 99% of the time. Even without RT to firewire, its RT to VGA is impressive and you can also scrub to an NTSC monitor via converter. Color correction is also excellent and there are also lots of other features that are really good. So is this th perfect NLE?No.

As you said its mpeg encoder is not up to scratch and there is not a reliable plugin architecture. Titling is also a problem although you can use Boris Graffiti as a plugin. Fusing a 2 hour timeline is about 25 minutes so I can live with that considering that rendering two pass vbr is extremely long on my P4 2.4HT. Tried Premiere pro but I think it really needs hardware cards to perform.

As for the software encoders I have tried trial versions for CSP excellent but slow and expensive, Mainconcep 1.42: not that impressed really. Must be doing something wrong. Gotta try Procoder 2.0. I really have no regrets with the $55.00 I spent, wouldn't have bought it full price and I can still buy premiere pro upgrade any time. BTW they have a new SDK for LE 6 so maybe we will get some frameservers yet.

DJ

[Dr Mordrid]

Originally posted by Kris1
... with your trackrecord, I've no troubles believing you, DrM, but the trouble with Ulead has always been their NLE packages aren't exactly money-earning machines for them, hence I question it's that high on their priority list.

I hope the service pack patches up the encoder to latest standards (DVDWS 2.2 level or something similar).

But yeah, I would like the idea of a MSP-on-steroids very, very much. In fact, it's high time Ulead finaly puts the GUI of MSP to rest : I'm 100% sure many people remain ignorant about MSP because they're blinded by a GUI that looks and feels exactly like the one used on MSP2.5 under Windows 95.

Of course I cannot confirm or deny anything you've suggested

MSPro has the reviews to be sure but Adobe, for lack of a better word, "encourages" hardware makers to bundle it with their products with warrior pricing. That and Ulead was slow off the mark to offer SDK's for their realtime and effect engines.

You also have a large percentage of programmers for the board makers who cut their teeth on the Mac version of Premiere, thereby causing discrimination by familiarity.

Like it or not non-board users see all the board ads with Premiere bundled and think "gee.....must be a good program"....true or not.

Now....as far as the MSPro UI goes I agree that some changes are long overdue. Just remember these are my ideas and not anything Ulead has hinted at.

Single track editing is one (no A/B & FX track...just one master track with the effects abutted) and the ability to put transitions between any tracks.

Multiple timelines would also be nice if implemented in a way that would make it a "video outliner"; meaning you could put multiple parts of a project on several timelines then use the "master" one for assembling their contents as "virtual clips". The ability to use multiple timelines as separate viewports on a single project would also be a plus.

I'd also like to see much larger effect dialogs that incorporate either a longer keyframer or the ability to call up a separate keyframer window with extended features (IMO the better option, esp. if its based on Cool3D Production Studio's).

An alternative to larger effect windows could be a single scrollable window (for effects with lots of options), again with either a longer keyframer or the ability to call up a separate enhanced one. I guess this could also be added to the Production Library and have it automatically brought up front when you apply an effect.

Next on my hit-list would be speeding up the rendering speed of the embedded titler and incorporting vector titler features in it. That or do what Adobe did with Premiere 6.5 and Pro and get Inscriber to make them a Title Express plugin. This would basically take away the need for CG Infinity.

Outside of these structural changes I'd attack the color correction engine bigtime, base the timeline on YUV instead of RGB (this would make CCorrection easier too), improve the keyer with a subpixel matte choker, among other things.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by paulw
US$59.95 for Procoder Express

Sorry, I thought you were meaning ProCoder 2, which is nominally $599

[Brian Ellis]

Originally posted by Kris1
... with your trackrecord, I've no troubles believing you, DrM, but the trouble with Ulead has always been their NLE packages aren't exactly money-earning machines for them, hence I question it's that high on their priority list.

To quote Francis Urquhart in 'House of Cards', you may think that, I couldn't possibly comment!

[Kris1]

Brian :

Oh, but I'd love to be proven wrong, you know.

DJ :

Hey I warned you. Frustration got the better of me. Happens sometimes, I appologize.

Yes, I understand what you're saying, and I think that in essense we have very similar opinions. I also didn't want to discard LE as some bad program, because LE's a brilliant piece of programming, but it is let down by a couple of serious flaws. The fact I too "only" payed 55$ doesn't change that, and furthermore if it would turn out the new encoder produces usable results, it just proves my point about LE's keyfeature for Pinnacle : generating a continious stream of income, well after the initial sale has been made. Every companies' dream, and every customers' nightmare.
Also, Pinnacle's pretty shady when it comes to "being fair". Example : double layer DVD writers. "Yes" they say, it will be supported in LE6.0 . I haven't seen any comment if they would do the same for 5.5. Even worse, I haven't seen comments they would _support new double layer writers_ even at single layer mode ?! (Nec 3500 for example : I got a comment from Pinnacle here saying "you'd better stick with the older model"). Other than binding the customer to you, I see no reason for not including a kind of "generic DVDwriter" profile which does NOT leave you worrying if your new, cheap and good writer will work with your program. Ulead proves this can be done. Adobe proves it can be done. Heck DVDlab proves it can be done. Pinnacle _chooses_ not to do so.

I also completly agree that if you look at "cardless performance", LE's MILES ahead of Adobe on more fields than I care to sum up here, and the quality of the preview in LE's indeed absolutly astounding. But sadly, the _final output stage for DVD_ , and lets agree that's the most important part of it all these days, is indeed superiour with Adobe. I mean, just LE versus Ppro, ok. But LE versus Ppro + Encore + Audition + After Effects ? Nope.

Now, we all know no NLE is perfect, but just how closely it approches this mathematical point of infinity depends on the answers to these two simple questions : _does the problem affect the quality of my end-product_, and _what can I do to get around it_

We both know, the answer to question 1 is "absolutly", and sadly the answer to question number 2 is "apart from spending even more money and more time, very little". I've heard about the new SDK, question remains how much effort Pinnacle has made to make it a USABLE one. I mean, officially Edition had a Premiere plugin port too. It was neigh to unusable, but you couldn't say it wasn't there.


But more importantly, what about CSP and your system speeds : What kind of rendering times are you talking about, what exact version are you using ? What kind of rendering times whould you find acceptable ? (answer : "ready yesterday" does NOT count ) What kind of encoding speeds are you seeing at what settings exactly ? How long are your typicall projects, is that 2 hour project you refer to typicall ? How do you export exactly ? What kind of drive setup are you using ? Encoding to the same drive your source file originates from for example can seriously slow down the encoding in my experience.

I'm not sure you're doing something _wrong_ really, you do know what you're talking about, I know you do. But I can hardly call CSP "slow" in my opinion. We may well have different opinions about speed, quality and performance. I'd like to get to the bottom of this.

In order to keep this thread on track, and out of respect for the originator of the thread, it might be a better idea to continue this debate over email.

Take Care Y'all

[DJ]

Kris I agree with your points but I am just saying that for $55.00 I am not about to argue. I know Pinnacles reputation very well, after all I started with the DC20 (remember we had that discussion already). As to encoding times, for two hours, 2 pass vbr takes about 7 1/2 hours. 2 1/2 each for the video information file and each pass. Settings are 6500 max 4800 average and 3000 min. Oh Iam using vesion 2.67 and I prefer to author in DVD Lab and burn in nero anyway.

DJ

[Kris1]

*cough*

Nearly 8 hours ? So you're running a 1:4 or something ? I fully understand your complaining now.

Now, to be 100% honest, I can't even remember what kind of speed I got with a similar setup : I kinda skipped the 2.4 situation early on and went ahead with OC'ed 2.6's instead running a stable 3gig. But my gut feeling would tell me 1:4 on a P4 2.4 is slower than I would expect it to be. Also, it's a reminder why I found it so sad Pinnacle refused to implement the drivers C-Cube's hardware encoder on the DV500 to help accelerate mpeg2 creation from inside LE.

In Procoder2.0, I used a minimum of 3000, a max of 6000, profile was set on "high quality", but I was running a one-pass VBR to achieve 2:1. Even so, the resulted quality on that 3+ hour thing was enough to see my RTx.100 owning friend performing a perfect Willy-Coyote "jaw drop" imitation. Granted, this would not fly everytime : it depends on the video footage contents to a very high degree, and most of the times you'd still be doing a 2-pass for optimum results.

In case you haven't found it, here's my temporary email-adress.

kris-1@tiscali.be

Maybe I can help you out, you've raised my interest now.

Take Care,