ProCoder Woes

[guns1inger]

OK. First, some background. The source is a VHS master approx. 13 years old. Captured via a JVC VHS player, through a TBC-1000, into a Panasonic DV camera, then via passthrough down the firewire to the drive (OK, the DV step isn't the best way). The source, given the age of the tape, is noisy, and suffers from many issues, including poor contrast in some scenes, poor white balance in others (daylight settings under tungsten etc) etc. A basic pass was done through VirtualDubMod to remove noise and restore clarity. The resulting file was loaded into Vegas, edited, filters applied to certain scenes to adjust for the contrast and colour cast error previously described. The results, while not DVD quality, are certainly an improvement.

Normally, at this point, I would output from Vegas as an mpeg-2 stream, using 2-pass VBR (4200, 6000, 9000), and author from there. However, this time it's personal. This tape is my wedding video, so I want something a little better. The output from Mainconcept is pretty good, but a little soft. For DV and CG sources, I usually don't mind, but this time I was hoping for a little more clarity in the output.

A collegue has ProCoder 2, so I dumped the 10+GB onto tape, and took it round to play. I tried three encodes.

2-pass VBR (4200, 6000, 9000) - Mastering Quality
CBR (9200) - Mastering Quality
CQ - Mastering Quality

CQ produced the strangest results, deciding on a very low bitrate (2120-ish). In all cases, the output was course, and unpleasant. At 4x Zoom on my Pioneer standalone, compression artifacts were very obvious on all three encodes.

Back at home, I did a final run, this time with CCE SP, 3-Pass VBR (4200, 6000, 9000). It seems to be the best compromise - not too soft, but not to harsh.

My question is, why was I getting such poor results from ProCoder, when it has such a reputation ? While searching for answers I browsed the ProCoder forum at Canopus, and found all sorts of claims, but I could not reproduce these results.

I guess CCE SP will remain my weapon of choice for VHS sourced work for the moment.

[lordsmurf]

CQ produced the strangest results, deciding on a very low bitrate (2120-ish). In all cases, the output was course, and unpleasant. At 4x Zoom on my Pioneer standalone, compression artifacts were very obvious on all three encodes.

Well, duh.
High zoom, low bitrate ... that's what happens.

Procoder mastering quality on v2.0 has produced some odd results, that I have seen. I still prefer the v1.x mastering quality.

[guns1inger]

Even at high bitrates (CBR 9000+) ProCoder seems to have a nasty effect that neither mainconcept or CCE SP have. The 4x Zoom was used to try to understand why the procoder output was so harsh at normal magnification.

[lordsmurf]

MC is soft focus.
CCE adds mosquito noise.

[Skynet107]

Procoder lovers will always tell you that CCE adds "noise" but the perceptual result is what really matters. And perceptually, CCE just plain does the best job, especially at lower bitrates.

Good luck with your project.