Encoding upgrade: Vegas 6 vs. ProCoder Express?
 

Greetings all,
i've been working with Vegas 4 for a long time now, and i'm ready to upgrade my encoding capability. Vegas 4 lacks 2 pass encoding, i believe. Both vegas 6 (Mainconcept) and canopus procoder express have 2 pass VBR encoding abaility. As i understand it, Procoder 2 has something like 9 pass encoding.. something i'm sure we'd all love access to. However, i don't think i can afford ProCoder at this point ($400 i believe?).

Both an upgrade to Vegas 6 and purchasing procoder express are within my price range. Any suggestions on which one is more worth it... from an encoding point of view?
Thanks so much,
matt

Not considering the MPEG2 encoders, Vegas 6 + DVDA 3 is well worth the price of the upgrade from 4.0. However, I've never used ProCoder to have a comparison.

you are comparing apples to oranges... vegas is an editor, first and foremost, not a media encoder... if all you want is to improve the mpeg encoding that's in vegas 4, verify that it won't do two-pass encoding first, then see if mainconcept offers an upgrade to the encoder seperately... it would be a lot cheaper... vegas 4 does use the mainconcept encoder, right? lol, i only work with vegas 5.

procoder 2 offers two-pass encoding in something they call mastering mode, but i am not aware that it'll do more than two passes... it is a better encoder at that setting than anything mainconcept can do, but mainconcept is a good encoder anyway.

i don't know how procoder express compares, but you could read the canopus forum to get more info.

Thanks for the replies.
Vegas 4 does everything i want it to do, editing-wise. However, i've been unhappy with its encoding for a long time. I am certain that it is not capable of 2-pass encoding... just single pass VBR.

I've been reading alot about encoders over the last 24 hours and it seems that procoder gets the vote for best picture quality when compressing to mpeg2.
It also seems that procoder 1.5 has a better picture quality than procoder 2.

Looking at some screen grabs, it certainly looks like procoder is alot cleaner than main concept.

I'm testing some stuff now and will be using both main concept and procoder to compare (although I am using vegas 6 and dvda 3) - I'll post up result when I'm done

In case anyone is interested...
I found the procoder (version 1.5) to be better picture quality than the main concept encoder (that comes with vegas).
On shots like interviews and such, the difference isn't clear, but for more complex stuff, it does look cleaner.
And procoder was faster too.

You might be worth getting procoder instead of using the vegas encoder