an honest look at TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5

[deadrats]

TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5, what a freaken name! For those of you that have been living under a rock or just couldn't give a flying "f" bomb, that is the name of the successor to TMPG 4 Express.

TMPG 4 Express was the first to support any type of CUDA acceleration, albeit only for mpeg-2 decoding and filtering, but if you had a high bit rate 1080i mpeg-2, that you wanted to de-interlace and convert to h264, it was worth it's weight in gold.

TE4 was also the first video related app, and to this day one of the few, to support SSE4 and what a difference that made. In test after test, comparing a phenom 9500 (easily the crappiest quad core ever made and one of the top 10 biggest disappointments from a cpu stand point) to an E7400, when encoding mpeg-2, with SSE4, it was actually faster, by a convincing margin, than the phenom 9500. When encoding with main concept's h264, from within TE4, SSE4 allowed the E7400 to match the encoding performance of the phenom.

Unfortunately it seemed like the people at Pegasys, the company that brought us all the tmpg variants, were content to rest on their cans, as progress stagnated with regards to improvements to TE4, with just some bug fixes and support for some additional input formats being the only changes made.

Time has a way of passing leaders by and it wasn't long before other consumer grade video editing software brought features that matched and surpassed those found in TE4.

Sony introduced Movie Studio HD 10, a somewhat gimped version of their famous Vegas software, a direct competitor to TE4 at a similar price point ($95 vs $100). Sony’s big selling point was the gpu acceleration, including a CUDA powered Sony AVC encoder as well as the Main Concept CUDA powered encoder. Though I personally find the interface counter intuitive and clunky and the encoding parameters are severely lacking, there are many that swear by this software and are loyal users.

TE4 also had Cyberlink's offer, power director 9, that likewise featured CUDA filtering and encoding, though they were never able to get it working properly: with PD7 Cyberlink advertised gpu powered mpeg-2 and h264 encoding, though I could only get the mpeg-2 encoding to work (the app would crash if I tried gpu h264 encoding); with PD8 the situation was reversed and gpu powered h264 encoding worked fine but mpeg-2 encoding would crash the app. With PD9 they just said the hell with it and simply offer gpu accelerated h264 encoding, but they have added CUDA and OPEN CL support, as well as Quick Sync, support in addition to "64 bit-ness".

The reality is that PD9 borders on being a toy, a $70-$95 toy, depending on version. PD9 lacks any serious filtering capabilities, lacks any significant fine tuning of encoding parameters and quite is a half assed editor.

If compared against these two offerings, an argument could be made that TE4 was the better choice at $100, after all it was simpler to use, had a more intuitive layout, you could "chimp" your way through the gui, offered more customization of encoding parameters and if one were so inclined a spurs engine plug in was available, at extra charge, that allowed a spurs engine card to be used for encoding and decoding.

But, there are many fish in the ocean and TE4 had some serious competitors, some commercial apps, some open source apps.

For the average user on a budget, that simply needed to do some basic editing, avi demux and xmedia recode were/are available, free of charge, legally and reasonably capable.

For those that required more muscle, there are what many may consider to be the best choices in the price range, namely Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus HD ($100) and Roxio's version included with their suite Creator 2011. For those of you that don't know, Roxio is owned by Sonic, the people behind the professional grade Cinevision. Using the two of these side by side one gets the feeling that they were coded by the same people, as they both use Main Concept's SDK, both offer full adjustment of h264 encoding parameters, both offer main concept's CUDA AVC encoder (with full control over available encoder settings) and in the case of Roxio, it also offers Main Concept's OPEN CL encoder for ATI cards and support for Intel's Quick Sync is rumored to be available shortly.

Pegasys had to do something and their answer is TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5. With the new name comes a new color scheme and a somewhat new layout but it's not that different that a user accustomed to TE4 won't be able to figure out how to use it. The big changes lie under the hood, and they are substantial.

Pegasys had a long time relationship with Main Concept, licensing their h264 encoder, which they included for a number of years in their software. For those of you that don't know some time ago Divx Inc bought Main Concept and since they did, the price of Main Concept's software skyrocket (not that it was ever cheap to begin with). Whereas MC's h264 encoder (that also did mpeg-2 and mpeg-1 encoding) used to cost $500, once Divx bought them out, they changed the gui, changed the name to MC Reference and started charging $2500. My guess is that Divx Inc asked for too much cake to license their Divx mpeg-4 asp codec, as well as the MC H264 and CUDA AVC codecs and Pegasys decided to go a different route.

While TVMW5 still features Divx encoding, gone is MC's H264 replaced by the ubiquitous x264. That's right, in addition to the new output support for the mkv format, TVMW5 integrates x264 directly into the app, and it manages to do it seamlessly. encoding using x264 is quite easy, allowing an end user to choose from a number of speed/quality trade offs, namely: fastest, fast, somewhat fast, normal, somewhat slow, slow and very slow. Needless to say the slower the setting the higher the quality. For those that wish to get their hands dirty, you can also go into the "advanced" tab and change numerous quality settings.

The reality is however that mkv support and x264 encoding is not what's going to sell this app, one can download the excellent Media Coder for free and get the same thing, if not more.

What Pegasys is hanging their hopes on is hardware acceleration, namely CUDA and Quick Sync.

TVMW5 allows a user to choose from a number of decoders; for mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 sources you can choose from the standard software decoder or the CUDA one (in all honesty it's Nvidia's Pure Video) and for H264 sources you can choose between those 2 or Intel's Media SDK decoder (if a non-Quick Sync enabled cpu is detected it reverts to software mode).

For AVC encoding you have the choice of x264, a CUDA based encoder or the Intel Media SDK h264 encoder.

The encoding options for both the CUDA encoder and the Intel AVC encoder are very limited, with the latter having the options of normal and somewhat slow as well as setting the motion search range to a custom number (default 16) as well as setting a slice count. Both the SDK and CUDA encoder only allow CBR and 1 pass VBR while x264 allows the additional choice of 2 pass VBR.

CABAC and CALVC are available for all three choices, and there are varying degrees of control over b frames, as well as setting the GOP length (default 250).

I did a number of test encodes, using a variety of sources (all Blu-Ray), setting the GOP to 18, b frames to 2, CABAC and 1 pass VBR and in various combinations of decoder and encoder, in every case the combination of CUDA decoder and encoder could not be beat, either in visual quality or speed, it just smoke every other combination.

In all fairness, the SDK didn't work right with my AMD cpu, running in software mode, each time resulting in a file that played "choppy" or "jerky", if you will. Considering that Intel explicitly says that all SIMD optimizations are disabled in software mode if a non Intel cpu is detected, that may very well account for the output. Also, I would expect the Intel SDK encoder to beat the other 2 in both speed and quality, especially if the "somewhat slow" option is chosen coupled with a large motion search range.

So the question is this; does TMPGEnc Video Mastering Works 5 warrant the $100 asking price? The answer has to be a resounding NO.

For less money you can get a much more capable video editor from either Magix or Roxio, you can get similar CUDA encoding capabilities for free from Media Coder, and TMPG's implementation of the Intel Media SDK encoder is pathetic.

If you download the SDK documentation you will see that it has hardware support for VC-1, Mpeg-2 and AVC decoding as well as Mpeg-2 and AVC encoding, It supports a tons of video preprocessing features as well as various encoding parameters that would greatly aid in visual quality and Nvidia's Pure Video likewise offers decoding acceleration for VC-1 in addition to the already supported Mpeg-2 and AVC decoding.

Quite frankly this product smacks of a company setting it's customers up for the next upgrade, with features that should already be present to be trickled in a bit at a time.

In all honesty, it would be prudent to wait for a while, Main Concept has already created an sdk built around Intel's Quick Sync technology and considering how many apps license Main Concept's software it's only a matter of time before we see a full and proper implementation of Quick Sync, not to mention I'm hoping someone within the open source community will jump on the band wagon and build an app around Intel's SDK.

Do yourselves a favor, skip this version, perhaps in a while it will justify it's cost, but as it stands now it's a waste of a Benjamin.

[chowmein]

Wow what a comprehensive & informative review! I tend to agree about Magix, it's very good. Thanks for your review deadrats.

[mh2360]

Not as comprehensive as it could have been, it just seems to be a rant as to how disappointed deadrats is with the GPU acceleration. What deadrats missed out were the improvements over TMPGenc Xpress 4 such as:

The proper import of H.264/AC3 WMC recorded .WTV files (there aren't many products which can achieve that).
The proper import of many other file formats (e.g MKV).
The new filters such as "mask" which does a fairly good job at hiding logos.
Output to H.264 MKV with AAC/AC3 (2.0 or 5.1)

And of course GPU accelaration, (which I don't use anyway).

The other encoders such as DivX, Windows Media , MPEG 1/2 are exactly the same as previous versions, the main changes are in the H.264 encoders and the ability to import more file formats correctly.

It's not strictly a new software product, owners of TMPGenc Xpress will have no trouble finding their way around. It's basically TMPGenc Xpress 4 with a different colored interface and new H.264 encoders. TBH it could have been an update rather than a whole new product.

[lordsmurf]

It's just v5 -- update to v4 -- and they habitually "jazz up" product names for years now.
Follow the numbers, not the names.

[deadrats]

ok, here's a sample test encode, the source is a 2 minute mkv that i clipped from an adult blu-ray i own, it's 1920x1080, 29.97 fps 23.2 mb/s, avc with ac3 audio, very high quality, it actually surpasses some main stream blu-rays and it's a very tough source to work with because it's MBAFF, which means that each frame is encoded partly interlaced and partly progressive.

because of this i disabled tmpg's de-interlace filter and did test encodes with the encoder set to "interlaced", the target was set as 1280x720, 4 mb/s, 2 channel ac3, and for the x264 encodes i disabled cuda completely and used the software decoder as well as software resizing, for the cuda encode i went cuda all the way and used the cuda decode, cuda encode and cuda resizing.

in the case of x264 i chose the "fastest" setting and in both cases the gop length was set to 18 with 2 b frames.

here are the samples:

http://rapidshare.com/files/446757824/Tia_Tanaka_-_Asian_Adventure_2.mkv

http://rapidshare.com/files/446757825/Tia_Tanaka_cuda_encode_decode_resizing_interlace.mkv

http://rapidshare.com/files/446757826/Tia_Tanaka_software_decode_and_resizing_x264_enc...interlaced.mkv

note: now mind you, this is what i'm talking about when i go on against "bit rate starving" an encode, i consider this type of thing idiotic but it does seem to be what many think is perfectly acceptable, taking a 1920x1080 23 mb/s source and transcoding it to a 4 mb/s 1280x720, so i thought i would simulate a common encoding scenario.

as for encoding speeds, the source is exactly 2 minutes long, the x264 encode took 6 minutes and the cuda encode took 4:44.

these results are pretty indicative of what i saw with all the encoding tests i did, i'm looking forward to eventually adding SB encoding times to these results.

[jagabo]

Third link (x264) doesn't work.

Something's weird with the "original" encode too. It shows 1,000 fps.

[poisondeathray]

Third link (x264) doesn't work.

There were some problems with his methodology in testing , and that source is problematic (it's MBAFF encoded but 30p content, and the cuda encoder didn't work properly)

I suspect there are some issues with this version with TMPGEnc, because another tester is getting 4-5x the speed using x264cli on a laptop (which doesn't make sense) . He said he is going to download the trial of TMPG for more testing so that should shed some light on what's really happening here

If you want more info discussed in more detail here
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=159411

[CubDukat]

I upgraded to this program from TEXP4, and for the most part I am very satisfied with it, except for one glaring problem that carried over from its predecessor: no AVC/h264-based Blu-Ray template. I've tried to create one my copying my favorite BD preset from MeGUI, but nothing seems to translate. Maybe it's because TMPGEnc Authoring doesn't create an AVC-encoded Blu-Ray disc, but that's still no excuse for them not to include an AVC template. Right now I use it for crunching down HD material for DVD's and Blu-Rays in MPEG-2, but I would eventually like to cut the MeGUI cord (it's slow, cantankerous, and seems to be sparsely updated).

If anyone knows of where I can find a good AVC Blu-Ray template, please let me know...

[budwzr]

Sony introduced Movie Studio HD 10, a somewhat gimped version of their famous Vegas software, a direct competitor to TE4 at a similar price point ($95 vs $100). Sony’s big selling point was the gpu acceleration, including a CUDA powered Sony AVC encoder as well as the Main Concept CUDA powered encoder. Though I personally find the interface counter intuitive and clunky and the encoding parameters are severely lacking, there are many that swear by this software and are loyal users.

I enjoyed reading this commentary.

Vegas is organized differently from other NLE's. You NEVER leave the main window. There are no tabbed views, no "start" or "finish", everything lives where you would use it. You can do 90% of the work with a mouse and never touch the keyboard.