Canopus ProCoder Express........

[DVWannaB]

I got home last night and had an email from Canopus, offering this product, which I imagine is fairly new. Can someone give us a run-down on this cheaper/lite version ($60) of the now popular Procoder video encoder? Is it worth the money? etc etc etc.

Thanks.

[vcddude]

Depends on what you want to do with it. I just bought it and am very happy with it. I think it produces the best DVD results from DV AVI. I've used TMPGEnc and CCE in the past and I think ProCoder produces the best end results. Not as fast as CCE, but much faster than TMPGEnc. Key features are:

- Cropping
- 3:2 Pulldown
- CBR
- 1 Pass VBR
- 2 Pass VBR

It has a consumer-focused GUI which guides you step-by-step in the encoding process. I find it really clunky but it's easy to get to all the settings via an "Advanced Settings" tab.

If you are just interested in DVD MPEG-2 encoding, then you should also consider CCE Basic and TMPGEnc. If you are interested in converting to zillions of other formats, then ProCoder might be your choice.

You should check out the Canopus forum at http://forum.canopus.com for good discussion of this new product.

I give it a big thumbs up!

vcddude

[DVWannaB]

Thanks for your insight vcddude. Much appreciated.

I bought CCE Basic about 10 days ago and already have TMPGEnc Plus. I will do a test of all three in VCD, SVCD and DVD and se which one I like best.

Thanks again & cheers.