ProCoder Express

[erratic]

Canopus ProCoder finally has a little brother: ProCoder Express ($59.95).

[BJ_M]

they sure don't give a lot of info on its specs do they ..

[erratic]

No, they don't, and there's no trial yet apparently.

German discussion here.

[vcddude]

I just purchased the new Canopus ProCoder Express for $59 online and it is sweet! Much faster and better quality for my DV-to-DVD conversions than TMPGEnc. Not as fast as CCE but better results -- not as grainy. I'm more concerned about quality than speed since I usually encode overnight. Better results than MC1.4 as well.

I convert analog Hi8 video with a Canopus ADVC-100 and have tried several MPEG encoders to convert these videos to DVD. TMPGEnc, and CCE are both excellent, but ProCoder produces the best results to my eyeballs. I did not care for MC1.4 results at all. Really grainy.

Last night I did a 2 Pass VBR DVD MPEG2 encode of a 1 hour 22 min DV AVI with ProCoder Express and it took 3 hours 51 minutes to complete. The results were excellent.

The ProCoder Express interface is really clunky because it is targeted for the consumer market but you can get to all the settings in an advanced settings tab.

It's definitely worth the $59. Also has 3:2 Pulldown flag and cropping capabilities.

[lordsmurf]

I want to know if it's faster than the old ProCoder.

[erratic]

I've been following discussions about PCE in the Canopus forums.

delgadil wrote:

FYI,

Last night I encoded a DV file with PCE, speed was as follows:

DV AVI length: 1 hour 22 minutes (~20GB)
PCE Settings: 2 Pass VBR, Highest Quality

Encoding time was 3 hours 51 minutes. So encode time was about 2.8x AVI play time.
Not bad, slower than CCE but faster than TMPGEnc. Quality is superb.

I have a 2.4GHz P4 with 512MB RAM and 200GB disk.