Cinemacraft
 

Okies.. im pretty excited about this as ive heard alot about this encoder, and a client has bartered with me and ive scored CCE V2.7

now im just curious if anyone else is using this??
Without me wwasting tie, what be some ideal settings??

I mainly work with 4:3 and Widescreen footage, in progressive scan and apparently this si the best encoder for this format...

Just wondering what your thoughts would be on this app or shoudl i jsut sell it off?? Ive only heard good things about it, so id like to ask around before i decide on anything

oh by the way, the actual program is

Cinema Craft Encoder SP V2.70.2 or somfin like that..
i havent reall ylooked at this app so i know nothign about it.. its too high a price for most of my clients..Apparently its also got a deinterlacer built in?? As well as 4:1:1/4:2:0 interpolation to 4:2:2 any thoughts?? ideas?? i have NO clue on this and its 4.30 am and id liek to start using it tomorrow.. :)

Cinema Craft Encoder SP, not the basic version? Are you kidding? That's a $2000 encoder! You must be quite the negotiator to land that thing.

That, or your client really likes you. ;)

yeah dude, tis the 2000 dollar one.. basically i helped him sell of some of his gear and this was one thing he couldnt sell so we bartered for it ;)

ok wel i created a a 4 pass mpg from some slowmo footage (a slowed down rack focus shot) and ran it through MC encoder (with a VBR of 8000, 6000 and 2500) then Procoder2, then CCE

MC looked sharp, but was rather grainy. Colour was lost, luminance was boosted, and a "grey ants" video noise was pretty obvious on a LCD monitor
Also, you can clearly see a horizontal shifting or waving downward as the codec is streaming. U wouldnt normally notice this but on a Res i have these panels, its clear as mud. Even though the MCe is what i use on a day by day basis, it DID look rather ugly

CCE, with a 4 pass encode at the sme bitrate took marinally longer (obviously) and it DID look clean, but those horizontal waves ended up randomising, so instead of waving downward, they "sprayed" hard to explain unles u know what your looking for..

ProCoder. 2 pass, custom template to mpg2 progressive scan (its not that easy to get PCoder to do progressive u really REALLY have to dig deep.
IMO procoder looked better.. no im serious. the difference in price considering procoder is like 500 bux while CCE is 2k isnt worth it... not when u toss teh two up side by side..

CCE and PCoder2 are both great and side by side most ppl woudlnt be able to tell the difference, but considering i got VERY similar results from PCoder2 doing a 2 pass vs CCE doing a 4 pass... i think ill stick with Pcoder and MC
That and the fact im out of USB ports for all these friggin dongles...

Quite interesting results, thanks for posting them. It's amazing ProCoder would beat out Cinema Craft SP. Great news for those of us who don't have such generous clients. ;-)

i wouldnt call him generous. id call him someone whos owes me money but couldnt afford to pay up in cash.. lol

anways.. the results i got were quite surprising considering the type of $$ were looking at. i realy thoguht i may had some sort of setting set wrong, but from everything i read, i seemed to have gotten it right..

But in all honesty, the Canopus codec, at 2 pass, DID stand up quite well against the CCE at 4pass.. there was no denying it..

as for MC, it was just too ugly im afraid.. compared to the two the only REAL benefit i find with MC is the time it takes to render (i get about 70FPS) whereas with Procoder, i get about 90% realtime..

It is rather intersting I think that we come to totally different conclusions when using the same MPEG2 encoders.

I made a short test-avi with colorbars and scrolling text etc etc - and my result was(short version)

1. MC encoder, slow but good quality(using default DVD profile,PAL)
2. CCE SP Trial, excellent speed, large file, OK quality
3. Procoder 2, large file, good speed, good quality

For now I use CCE Basic with a modified profile. It gives me 3x faster than realtime and good quality / medium file.

// Lazze

I noticed you both came to different conclusions. I'm not sure what to make of it. Maybe the different footage each of you encoded is the reason?

hmm. interesting... i must say that MC for me is tha fastest of the bunch... Single Pass VBR (u cant select any more) and this is when jacking up the search method and search range to full ball.. then again, im also encoding progressive scan footage which should theoretically be quicker than interlaced...

with reagrd to CCE.. even though it IS a great lil program, i cant honestly find any justification for the price (of 2grand) consideirng that it took 4 passes to give me results which equated to a 2 pass PCoder M2t..
Then again, PCoder doesnt seem to have been designed with Progressive footage in mind.. the fact that one must turn on adaptive deinterlacing to turn off the default interlacing method prior to conversion is a cockroach in itself.. It doesnt seem that Pcoder can read 25p in a 2:2 pulldown 50i stream.. as it should still be tagged as progressive, not interlaced... it jstu looks at the format of the video and ASSUMES that its interlaced and only gives u options for uppe ror lower fields.. NOT no fields.. this is prior to encoding... as in, how it recognises the input file...