What program best for you to convert the avi files from cs3 to mp4/mov with best quality result for uploading to web?

Why not use Adobe Media Encoder?

You might also check out Sorenson Squeeze.
Sorenson Squeeze (http://www.sorensonmedia.com/)

TMPgenc Xpress, or SUPER, works pretty well. SUPER is one of the suggested encoders for Vimeo.

TMPGEnc - Products: TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress Product Information (http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/te4xp.html)
SUPER . (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html)

I haven't liked MainConcept's encoder in the past. It produced lower-quality mpeg-2 files than TMPGenc, and I like the workflow of blowing out a Cineform HD AVI, and running that through TMGenc or SUPER, depending. TMPGenc was visibly better than MainConcept results (my wife noticed the difference, and she's not a videophile).

Oh, and on Windows, MainConcept-encoded MOVs (H.264 or whatever), tend to be washed out and not as crisp as encoding with a different encoder.

I haven't done any comparisons on CS4's version of MainConcept, though.

Thanks,
Matt

MPEG Streamclip.

You can try mp4Mobile (I'm not allowed to give links, so search in google). This program converts to mp4 with the best possible quality, I guess.

You might also check out Sorenson Squeeze.
Sorenson Squeeze (http://www.sorensonmedia.com/)
I use Sorenson for all my encoding.
You can dowload atrial version of it. Give it ago.

Sorenson Squeeze or Procoder 3

Gary & Graham,

if you compared Squeeze and Procoder to MPEG Streamclip and were able to achieve similar results, I would love to try your settings - would you please share them? For some reason, my results with these two, othewise great encoders, are contemptible compared to Streamclip.

Thanks,

Hi Evin, let's decide on a target image size and bitrate and/or filesize that you would be interested in for the comparison, to narrow down the range of options a bit....

Happy to do this, but may be a few days as I'm travelling presently.

Sure,

here's what I am able to achieve with Streamclip at 455kbps total (a+v, where audio is 48kbps mono), 480x272 pixels. File size comes out around 100-110 MB for 30 minutes.

http://mediaseven.tv/incontact/

I would love to achieve the same quality using Procoder and stop fooling with two separate programs, since I already use Procoder for encoding to MPEG2/DVD.

For HDV to 720P see this thread: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/flash-web-video/139496-i-reached-top-video-quality-youtube.html - see middle of first page for settings.

Thank you,