Main Concept vs. Ulead' Mpeg encoder

DGates schrieb am 26.12.2003 um 08:21 Uhr
I have been using Vegas Video 3 for editing, and then encoding with Vegas for creating mpegs for DVD's. I would then take the mpeg file over to Ulead's DVD Workshop to author the final product.

For the most part, I've been happy with main Concept's encoder. There are the slight pixelizations on some photo monatges when zooming in or out, but overall, fairly decent.

Just to simplify matters, I tried DVD Workshop for the encoding of an avi file, instead of Vegas. I was expecting that Vegas/Main Concept would look better.

I was wrong. The encoding quality of Ulead's encoder was far better. Not a single scene with the slight pixelated quality that I had come to expect with Main Concept.

So I'm done with Main Concept. Ulead's is superior.

Any others have similar results? Is there a better encoder with Vegas 4? Not that I care anymore.

Dirk

Kommentare

farss schrieb am 26.12.2003 um 09:00 Uhr
At what comparative bit rate are you encoding?
And on what are you playing it on?
These artifacts are not necessarily the result of the encoding I've discovered. In fact very high quality encoders producing output at the maximum bitrate look truly horrid on the average DVD player.
To be really certain of which one is doing the best encode you firstly need a player that's not going to hobble the quality that the encoder is capable. Then you need a component feed into a decent monitor.

And forget about starting with DV as the source, it has more artifacts than a top line mpeg2 encoder will produce.

Certainly the MC encoder isn't the worlds greatest, those are vastly more expensive and may take much longer to encode. Also you can get rid of a lot of the artifacts by adding a bit of blur, that'll help both the encoder and the decoder.

Maybe the ULead one is better, for some work I find TMPGEnc works better, on other stuff I cannot pick the difference. All I'm saying is it's very hard without very careful testing to really define which one is the better and there can be a lot of trickery going on that may not be immediately apparent that affects the result.
DGates schrieb am 26.12.2003 um 22:24 Uhr
Well Said. My comparison is simply how one DVD looks over the other. With Main Concept, which worked well for me, there was a ever-so-slight pixelization on photo montages with zooming in and out. This is a great way to test the encoding, because it's the same picture, only slightly different. It's not noticible so much with regular video.

I encoded at the same bitrate, a VBR averaging 7.5 for a 1 hr and 20 minute project.

When I say Ulead's was far superior, that's just alittle happy boasting about the quailty. But it definately was better.

Spot|DSE schrieb am 26.12.2003 um 22:34 Uhr
It all boils down to bitrate and content, and how the vid was prepped. Ulead also uses Main Concept's kernal, and so saying that "their's is better" doesn't make sense. It may have been better for a specific piece of footage at a specific bitrate, but that's where it ends. Scaling is better out of Vegas than out of DVDA or DVDWorkshop, but it's all in the prep and scaling. For instance, I could likely make that zoom pixelation go away, and get still yet a better encode with DVDA or ProCoder's 2pass.
Either way, both tools use the MC encoding tools.
StormMarc schrieb am 26.12.2003 um 23:16 Uhr
It's possible that the Ulead version of MC is the newer one that is supposed to have better image quality then the one in Vegas. I personally just bought Cinemacraft basic ($58) and so far I'm seriously impressed with the quality and the speed. I've only done one project on it but it looked great at both CBR and VBR and was much faster than TMPEG.

Marc
Spot|DSE schrieb am 27.12.2003 um 01:14 Uhr
Cinemacraft is very nice indeed. I can't comment any further, but can tell you that the MC version Ulead is using is exactly the same version as Vegas is using at this time.
I can say....that MC has some really cool stuff, and I think with the competitive landscape out there, 2004 will be a very interesting year for encoding. Remember, 2 years ago, no one was doing MPEG 2 at the DVD/home authoring level, so MPEG has been more or less fairly infant at this point in time. I'm pretty psyched to see some of the stuff I saw at IBC start to hit the streets soon.
AudioIvan schrieb am 27.12.2003 um 01:45 Uhr
@ Spot, EXACTLY
Ulead , Vegas , Premiere they all use MainConcept.However the new Mainconcept v.1.4.1(with two pass) produces quality comparable to CCE or Canopus Procoder v.2.0, yet still CCE is the best out there & it shines in encoding in low bitrates.There is a litle workaround if you have the new MC 1.4.1,you can copy mcdsv.ax & mcdvd_32.dll in system 32 make new reg string vidc.dvsd in
Regedit> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32 with value data mcdvd_32.dll so you can teke advantage of the new MC DV Codec which is v.2.4.9(very good & fast codec).All of this applies again if you have MC MainActor meaning:
You can copy all of the necessary dll's from MC MA dir in
C:\Program Files\Sonic Foundry\Shared Plug-Ins\File Formats and use updated version of the encoder or codec!!! NOTE :THIS DOES NOT WORK IF YOU COPY THE DLL'S & AX's FROM MC ENCODER V.1.4.1 DIR!!(someone here did that).
Anyway I'm more that happy with CCE Basic($58) & MC Encoder .v.1.4.1.

AudioIvan