Procoder guide

[ABAB]

I have a limited access to Canopus Procoder on a colleagues computer (vers 1.01.35).
I had a quick look around but there's not much around in the way of guides, anyone know if there are any?
I'm particularly interested in finding out the final file size if an encode (I reckon the bitrate calc might help there)...........I'm rambling now....

Cheers all

[Oracle]

You dont need a guide for this encoder, its very easy to use.

[ABAB]

Am I right in saying the only way to predict the final file size is to use the bitrate calc?

Ta

[Oracle]

yep there is a good free one on this site

[ABAB]

Thanks a lot, now I can get stuck in to it. My first impressions are great quality and pretty quick (TMPG is my usual encoder), although it does insist on 100% CPU usage..night time encodes then!

This does seem to be an 'under posted' encoder, any more tips or advice would be good.

Thx again mate.

[tphaggerty]

I have CCE Basic, MainConcept and Procoder. I finally sprung for ProCoder because it does produce the best results for DV AVI to DVD (at least interlaced NTSC), especially at bitrates that allow my 2 hour 8mm tapes to be put on a single DVD (use 4600 avg bitrate with 224Kpbs audio & you'll be fine). Some authoring programs (DVD Lab is one) require you to rename the program stream output from .mp2 to .mpg before they recognize the file.

Mastering Quality is definitely the way to go if you have a reasonable computer, my 2 hour encodes typically take up to 24 hours on a 1.4 AMD with over 512MB of memory - but the results are superb. Compared to CCE (which I can't seem to get to work well on interlaced AVI without LOTS of softening) and MainConcept (ALWAYS has macroblocking somewhere in the middle of my long encodes) the quality is very good, especially at lower bitrates (DVD MPEG2, I haven't done any MPEG1 work).

High Quality encoding is about 25% faster, I haven't experimented with the other settings to much. Leave intra-DC at 8 (or maybe 9), it doesn't seem to matter and it does speed up the encode a bit over 10. Don't use the Median filter - it seems to really cause breakup in background horizontal lines. The canopus forums are pretty active, you might want to check those out. Also, make sure that your friend upgrades to 1.5 if you plan to use MQ, its MUCH faster than prior versions - plus it has native AVISynth support - great for using all of the outstanding filters that are available (I use crop/addborders to recenter video from my very old 8mm camera and a filter called UnDot to remove random "dots").

Finally, Procoder can do field level encoding, which is *supposed* to give the absolute best results. I have been able to encode, but none of the (low end) authoring programs I have are able to correctly read the resulting files (haven't tried DVD Lab yet for this, but plan to). There is some discussion of this on doom9.

Good luck

[ABAB]

tphaggerty, thanks for taking the time to pass on that info, It's appreciated.
Like you, I think CCE is a pain in the a**e.
I'm going to go forum trawling now to educate myself a bit more, once again thx

[movieweb]

bit of advice here guys - someone said earlier that iprocoder uses 100% processing time and so must leave it on at night, presumably so you can use the pc!

heres a tip for xp users

open procoder but before you start the conversion press ctrl - alt - del to get the task manager up - go to the process tab and look for procoder.exe - right click it and choose 'priority' and change it to 'low'

that way it uses system idle time only and you can use the pc as if it wasnt running!

this does increase encoding time but not by that much surprisingly!

[perempe]

Would some1 tell me how fast is it? I have a Celeron running on 1200 (not Tua) with 256mb ram, Procoder"s framerate is around 7.6 in default settings (DV 2 SVCD, 6Mbit/sec full D1 mpeg-2 2 SVCD).

I'm using Procoder version 1.5.

How fast is it on other machines?