Comments

bjtap wrote on 12/18/2001, 3:59 PM
pumpernicklebac

Thanks mucho for the letting us know about 2.0b.
Barry
Chienworks wrote on 12/18/2001, 8:14 PM
Hmmmm. Interesting. The download page says,

"The MainConcept MPEG-2 plug-in is now available in VideoFactory as a separate purchase. To
purchase the plug-in, choose MainConcept MPEG-2 from the Save as Type drop-down list in the
Render As dialog. When you click the Save button, you'll be given the opportunity to purchase the
plug-in."

Has anyone gone this far yet? What's the price? I'd rather know that before
i start the download.
jimcho wrote on 12/18/2001, 10:31 PM
$30 for the standard version and $100 for the professional. The difference is that the professional version allows custom controls. Here is the description. The standard version only includes the first two.

Unlimited MPEG encoding
The standard and professional-level MPEG-2 encoders provide unlimited MPEG-2 encoding, allowing you to encode as many MPEG-2 as you wish.

Fixed templates
The standard and professional-level MPEG-2 encoders provide fixed templates for encoding files to NTSC SVCD, PAL SVCD, NTSC DVD and PAL DVD formats, with a choice of single stream or multiple stream output.

Custom controls
The professional-level MPEG-2 encoder provides custom controls for video quality, framerate, aspect ratio, profile, level, field order, motion estimation, constant bitrate, variable bitrate and more.
jimcho wrote on 12/18/2001, 10:45 PM
The new Main Concept Mpeg1 decoder is a definite improvement in quality over the Ligos encoder and has many customizable options. That alone is worth the download.

The MC decoder does not allow you to preview while decoding - strange, but not a big deal. The render times are also longer but well worth it for the improved quality.
danimal wrote on 12/19/2001, 12:57 AM
I dunno, I really don't see any improvement at all. I encoded a 4:36 720x480 DV clip that I test with to MA mpeg-1, and not only is it still horrifyingly slow at 40 minutes to finish, but the quality was absolutely terrible. This is on an XP machine with dual P3-933's, at 50% CPU utilization (both processors at 25%) because VF won't make use of extra CPU.

I love VF as an editor, but until they make some drastic changes to their rendering code, I don't have the time and patience to do anything more than assemble my video and write it back out in the same format and use something else like virtualdub to render it to the format I really wanted it to be in the first place. Anything that causes VF to process pixels invokes a bottleneck that has to be seen to be believed.