Cinemacraft SP2 or Procoder 3 for MPEG2 for DVD on Windows?

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Douglas Thigpen

Well-known member
I'm about to get ready to do final renders and such for an upcoming documentary. Since it seems that it's actually going to get out there a bit, I'd like the encoding to be top notch (relatively). I could also use a better encoder than Mainconcept / Adobe's Encoder for doing all of my other jobs that have SD DVD deliverables.

Anyways, to the point, between Cinemacraft SP2 and Procoder 3, which would those whom have experience with both recommend for primarily SD DVD encoding? (I have other h264 encoding solutions) I've seen the results from both and they both seem to put the standard Mainconcept encoder that ships with CS3/4 as well as the one that ships with MPEG Pro HD to shame (correct me if I'm wrong).

Thanks,
 
I've been watching your post hoping somebody would shine a light on the "best" dvd encoder.
Shooting in 720 and burning a dvd seems to lose a lot of sharpness. Of course we have all seen commercial dvds that look great and I wonder where in the process the biggest loss in viewability happens.
Is it in the frame resizing or the compression? Have you gone the uncompressed avi to mpeg2 encoder route?
 
Yes, right now I output an uncompressed SD AVI and then that goes to the encoder, seems to be the best option. Just wondering which of these two would make the best final product out of that, if anyone has experience in it.
 
Fortunately I just got back to North Carolina and I have a friend here who does this stuff for a living (sort of) and owns both, so I'm going to see if I can go do some samples on each and then decide from there. Have to have the final out the door this week either way.
 
Al MacLeod said:
I've been watching your post hoping somebody would shine a light on the "best" dvd encoder.
Shooting in 720 and burning a dvd seems to lose a lot of sharpness. Of course we have all seen commercial dvds that look great and I wonder where in the process the biggest loss in viewability happens.
Is it in the frame resizing or the compression? Have you gone the uncompressed avi to mpeg2 encoder route?
Click to expand...


The biggest quality loss comes from the lack of quality pre-processing like scaling and grain removal. These two factors can change the look of your DVD output immensely before you even hit the mpeg-2 encoder.

I've noticed that both Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro have a draft quality scaling to them during output. This is what produces the bad results. Combine this with a noisy signal and Mpeg-2 just falls apart when trying to encode it.

Before you dump a bunch of money into a professional Mpeg-2 encoder, find out what your needs are. I might be able to save you money by encoding your project. Check the link in my signature for examples.
 
I definitely agree with your points. Fortunately, my videos / features are all pre-downrezzed and noise reduction is used when needed to clean up the video for a cleaner compression scenario (I use Neat Video with custom built profiles for each scene generally) for it. It's really down to the encoder at this point. But this particular one is a 2 hour documentary, vivid colors at times, not-so-fast movement in scenes. I mean, with pre-scrubbed video I can get a 'clean' encode with no artifacting at ~2.2mbps CBR (the first draft of this was 4 hours and the early work prints were distributed on Single Layer DVDs), I'm just looking for the best to encode at around a ~4mbps (got some extras to account for the other space) right now.

As for purchasing, given my encoding/compressionist knowledge and background, would definitely be more advantageous than using your services at $50/minute (not discounting them at all). I do a lot of mastering in h264 for Blu-Ray, just never really had to do my own 'pro' level Mpeg2 DVD encodes before, just event encodes and such, which have always turned out great, I'm just looking to take it to that 'next' level and after trying both compressors on an associate's machine with the same footage, I'm confident that's the method.
 
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Douglas Thigpen said:
I definitely agree with your points. Fortunately, my videos / features are all pre-downrezzed and noise reduction is used when needed to clean up the video for a cleaner compression scenario (I use Neat Video with custom built profiles for each scene generally) for it. It's really down to the encoder at this point. But this particular one is a 2 hour documentary, vivid colors at times, not-so-fast movement in scenes. I mean, with pre-scrubbed video I can get a 'clean' encode with no artifacting at ~2.2mbps CBR (the first draft of this was 4 hours and the early work prints were distributed on Single Layer DVDs), I'm just looking for the best to encode at around a ~4mbps (got some extras to account for the other space) right now.

As for purchasing, given my encoding/compressionist knowledge and background, would definitely be more advantageous than using your services at $50/minute (not discounting them at all). I do a lot of mastering in h264 for Blu-Ray, just never really had to do my own 'pro' level Mpeg2 DVD encodes before, just event encodes and such, which have always turned out great, I'm just looking to take it to that 'next' level and after trying both compressors on an associate's machine with the same footage, I'm confident that's the method.
Click to expand...

Remember that your kind of scaling will help to improve compressibility at the loss of sharpness. Not all scalers are the same.

Well if you've gone through that kind of pre-processing, then you'll want to find an encoder that allows you to tweak the matrix for really squeezing out that extra quality at low bitrates. CCE allows you to do this, but I'm not sure if ProCoder allows for that.

An Mpeg-2 matrix basically tells the encoder how to spend the bits on various macroblocks, DCT conversions per pixel based off complexity, and other various mathmatical stuff.

Good luck.
 
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