5DtoRGB new beta now FREE and UNLIMITED!

Noiz2 said:
Yes a sound FX cataloging software and when it gets finished an audience / donor tracking application for non-profits.

Personally I don't consider a company where the owner replies personally to customer emails to be "big". And I'm sorry but you don't care about quality? You would buy something that didn't work as well from a small vendor over a product that worked better from a larger one? That makes no sense at all. If the products are about the same and the prices are about the same then I would in most cases lean toward the smaller developer. For mostly the same reasons you talk about. But I'm a professional and MY income depends on quality so I'm not going to buy low for some political agenda.

The mixed blessing is that small developers are far more likely to go under and leave you with unsupported or unusable software. To be fair the bigger companies orphan products, get bought and drop support etc. also. Both have happened a couple of times to me with fairly expensive apps. But I tend to lean to the small guy because they tend to listen to you, often give really good support, and make more targeted software.
Click to expand...

There are not many multinationals in this market. Companies are rather small. This is also true for the audio industry. It's more about attitude than size. I'm not talking about Red Giant in this case. Waves is larger than Algorithmix or the independent plugin developer, right? Waves practically have a monopoly now with their bundling practices which forced many good designers out of the market. That's something Microsoft also does, right? In the media player market, the web browser market etc. It's how a big company behaves. The same happened to the bayer workflow market. Cineform believed they had a monopoly and also liked to demonstrate that in forums. I chose uncompressed for my project vs their compressed bayer codec and they were furious:) Then they got dvinfo to pull the entire thread that made them look bad and informed people of something that might become an alternative for bayer workflow. That's how a big company behaves and it is sad IMHO for companies of this size.

Quality is important. But in this case it's a transcoding, decoding and encoding. There is not much room for a real quality difference. I expect both to be better than generic conversion software and better engineered, so they should perform equally well.

In my raw camera project I chose not to use Cinema DNG (DNG frames). I could use DNG and forget about it, like a competitor did. Then everybody will have to use Adobe products with it. I chose to spend time and money to develop software and processing algorithms instead. Most people thing "open" when they think DNG, but I think "Adobe", a company that will eventually not leave room for anything except AVID in the video editor market (Yes, even Sony and Apple). Adobe have resources, they can bundle to infinity until there is nothing else left and nobody can compete. Photoshop is already a monopoly today, right? Sometimes we have to see the big picture besides our personal short term interest. The software market, is what we will depend on everyday for doing our job. We can't be indifferent to these things. When something becomes a monopoly, you can be sure we will pay more and due to lack of competition we will get less. One day, an operating system by Microsoft will cost 2x as much as a computer and we could have no other option but to buy it.
 
Adobe and Avid are competitors not the same company. Waves is a big company but they are nowhere close to a monopoly. I actually don't like the company because of their upgrade practices and don't own any of their products. Since I work in post and have quite a few plugins I can safely say you can never touch Waves and never miss them.

I agree with your general point. I just think your off in some assumptions. Saying Waves is a monopoly is like saying Canon is a monopoly. MS is an operating system. It's true that bundling has helped them a lot but there never was any real competition. Apple doesn't allow their OS on non Apple hardware (now that is a monopoly) and nobody has ever packaged lynix in a consumer friendly install. They had competition in the DOS market and way back when when I owned a PC I ran DR DOS. But nobody ever sold a (reliable) alternative to Windows. IBM gave it a shot but they badly bungled it. GEM OS was great but it was never widely available except on Atari ST's.

Anyway the point is this product is promoted by the OP for two things Quality and Batch processing. And they compare it to apps that don't do batch and they claim much better quality.
Grinder does batch so I'm curious how it stacks up in Quality.

If this app is noticeably better in quality well then there you go. If not I'll stick with Grinder. RG has great support and if they happen to be a notch higher on the size ladder it doesn't bother me. THey are small and act like it. This is not a knock on the OP's software. If I was buying fresh and they were about equal then it could go either direction. But if they want me to switch it requires some advantages that they have that I don't already have.
 
Noiz2 said:
Adobe and Avid are competitors not the same company. Waves is a big company but they are nowhere close to a monopoly. I actually don't like the company because of their upgrade practices and don't own any of their products. Since I work in post and have quite a few plugins I can safely say you can never touch Waves and never miss them.

I agree with your general point. I just think your off in some assumptions. Saying Waves is a monopoly is like saying Canon is a monopoly. MS is an operating system. It's true that bundling has helped them a lot but there never was any real competition. Apple doesn't allow their OS on non Apple hardware (now that is a monopoly) and nobody has ever packaged lynix in a consumer friendly install. They had competition in the DOS market and way back when when I owned a PC I ran DR DOS. But nobody ever sold a (reliable) alternative to Windows. IBM gave it a shot but they badly bungled it. GEM OS was great but it was never widely available except on Atari ST's.

Anyway the point is this product is promoted by the OP for two things Quality and Batch processing. And they compare it to apps that don't do batch and they claim much better quality.
Grinder does batch so I'm curious how it stacks up in Quality.

If this app is noticeably better in quality well then there you go. If not I'll stick with Grinder. RG has great support and if they happen to be a notch higher on the size ladder it doesn't bother me. THey are small and act like it. This is not a knock on the OP's software. If I was buying fresh and they were about equal then it could go either direction. But if they want me to switch it requires some advantages that they have that I don't already have.
Click to expand...

I know Adobe and Avid. My point was Adobe is not powerful enough to take Avid just yet and the best form of monopoly is a oligopoly of two anyway. Oligopolies are perfectly legal although they can price fix, sell their hardware below cost to bar entry and keep their market share and accessories systems rolling etc.

You mention Canon. Canon and Nikon is a fine example of an established oligopoly. In 2006 they had 80% of the SLR market, the most dynamic still camera segment. In 2007 they had 83%. Look at the tiny competition and what the trying to do. Kodak, Fuji, Leica, Panasonic, Olympus, Sigma, etc. That's what the 4/3 system is really about. A chance to survive and compete. Sony are rolling their own and they might do well due to their specific strengths.

You also mention Waves. The Waves bundle practices is why many people will not even try your effort in a signal processing plugin, it's why the sales are low, and why you can't afford to market it properly and enter the market. It turned signal processing plugins into a commodity. It only left room for quality software design in the high end segment. Waves might be the reason why you might not have the option to buy some pretty high quality signal processors.

A monopoly starts with pure enterpreneurship and good intentions and the product obviously has some advantage in order to become a monopoly, feature set, time to market, capital, etc. The fact is that monopolies and oligopolies help no one.
 
Uhhh

So, back to the topic at hand - what do other people think of this program?

I transcoded a project to ProRes 4:2:2 in Rec 709 and i thought it looked better than anything else I've seen out of the 7D.
 
Noiz2 said:
So not to rain on your parade but the obvious alternative to this is Grinder by Red Giant but I don't see any talk about that or any comparisons. It does almost the same thing your app does except that it can also create an offline version at the same time and add window burns to the offline. Otherwise both seem VERY similar. So it would come down to features (ie if you really needed an off line version etc) and quality.
Click to expand...

There are many programs out there that do the same thing 5DtoRGB does. However, the approach that 5DtoRGB takes is unique in that is does not use QuickTime for H.264 decoding. This allows it to avoid the quality problems associated with QuickTime's H.264 decoder. If I recall correctly, Grinder still uses QuickTime for H.264 decoding, so it is basically doing the same thing MPEG Streamclip and Canon's E1 plugin do. They are all going through the same pipeline, and are all subject to the quality hit. They're also not free (for now).

Sometimes the larger company will provide more features or match the quality, they have more resources, so this is quite probable.
Click to expand...
Or they will be appealing to the masses, which means they may take a "lowest common denominator" approach. I'm not interested in that. I am interested in making the best product for professionals and those who demand the absolute highest quality image. As a Canon HDSLR owner myself as well as a working post-production supervisor, I have very strict quality requirements. 5DtoRGB came out of a desire to satisfy these requirements, since nobody else seemed to be stepping up to the plate.

Then they got dvinfo to pull the entire thread that made them look bad and informed people of something that might become an alternative for bayer workflow. That's how a big company behaves and it is sad IMHO for companies of this size.
Click to expand...
I too had a thread of mine deleted from dvinfo.net. I emailed Chris Hurd asking why it was deleted, but never got a response. I suspect one of his sponsors didn't like it.
 
Otis, Otis , Otis,...

Since your are so opposed to monopolies and Canon is an even worse "oligopoly", you don't need this software. So go find some DSLR made in a garage ;~)
 
Thomas Worth said:
There are many programs out there that do the same thing 5DtoRGB does. However, the approach that 5DtoRGB takes is unique in that is does not use QuickTime for H.264 decoding. This allows it to avoid the quality problems associated with QuickTime's H.264 decoder. If I recall correctly, Grinder still uses QuickTime for H.264 decoding, so it is basically doing the same thing MPEG Streamclip and Canon's E1 plugin do. They are all going through the same pipeline, and are all subject to the quality hit. They're also not free (for now).
Click to expand...

Well they are not in beta either, RE: the "free for now"comment.

But as you kind of mention, with in reason price is not the issue, quality is. Speed may fit in also for some but quality is the big issue.

Now you better watch out, if you get successful Otis is going to label you some flavor of "opoly"!

So I think the answer to my original question is that you think Grinder is using Quick Time and so your quality should be better.

I don't know if they are using Quick Time or not but I have a cataloging application I use for sound (not the one I created) that does conversions much better than Quick Time so I know that Quick Time is not nec the best at that sort of thing. So you are probably right, if they do use Quick Time. It's worth a test anyway. I probably wont get to it for a few weeks because of other commitments.

Thanks for answering.
 
Noiz2 said:
Otis, Otis , Otis,...

Since your are so opposed to monopolies and Canon is an even worse "oligopoly", you don't need this software. So go find some DSLR made in a garage ;~)
Click to expand...

After demonstrating your ignorance on how the market works, you show your lack of respect to the DIY'ers in general.
 
Thx for sharing this great little app. The comparisions look great, really amazing how much quality Quicktime simply trashes.

How is the progress on batch conversion? We would need something to convert professionally shot footage in the next weeks, is there any hope?
Will you also support conversion of whole folder structures (mirror them to another place?)
And in case you run into problems with batch conversion.. is there maybe the chance to get hold of a command line version for mac?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top