I have tried all of them out at one point and I could see the difference
depending on the type of footage, however I didn't play enough
with ProCoder. I know (from other people) that ProCoder has
the best (cheap) encoder currently available. That comes from
peope I trust. Anyway, all three encoders are top notch and
certainly better than the encoders bundled with at least Sony
Vegas & Adobe Premiere.

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : I have tried all of them out at one point and I could see the difference
depending on the type of footage, however I didn't play enough
with ProCoder. I know (from other people) that ProCoder has
the best (cheap) encoder currently available. That comes from
peope I trust. Anyway, all three encoders are top notch and
certainly better than the encoders bundled with at least Sony
Vegas & Adobe Premiere. -->>>

I currently have Vegas 5 and am considering purchasing ProCoder.

I'm assuming that I render my DV project to AVI (DV Setting) and then import the result file into ProCoder. Is this correct?

Thanks inadvance.

Good question.... Rob?

you can frame serve off of the vegas timeline to procoder, using a freebie tool written by a guy named satish.

i believe that vegas uses the mainconcept mpeg encoder, which does a pretty good job... don't run out to spend big $$$ on procoder without demo'ing the differences between the two first.

procoder is more efficient, but it typically gives a softer picture than the mainconcept encoder... that said, i've run 'em both extensively, and procoder works better for the type of footage i work with... ymmv.

I would try it in the following order:

1. frameserve (see post above and my comments below)

2. uncompressed AVI

3. DV AVI

Satish has a frameserver that was mentioned in a sticky post
on top of this Vegas forum:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=30426

The link to Satish's site is: http://www.debugmode.com/

Get the frameserver there. Frameserving is the technique that
allows you to transfer footage from one application to another
without storing it on the harddisk (and thus saving [lots of] space).