Advantage of other encoders?

Steve672 wrote on 5/2/2003, 11:26 AM

I see many posts on this forum about using encoders other than Vegas, e.g. TMPGEnc, Huffy, etc. From what I understand, the encoder that Vegas uses is pretty darn good wrt quality. Would some of you that use these third party encoders tell me what would the advantages be, I am just curious and would like to know if I am missing something.

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 5/2/2003, 10:16 PM

Its 99.9999% 'the grass is greener on the other side of the fence' thing. <wink>

Honest. Nobody and I mean NOBODY is more of a fussbutton and world class nitpicker than I am. If there was a software encoder better then that's what I'd use. Unless you want to dig very deep in your pocket and pay lots of money to get something that under certain condtions may be marginally better, maybe during the fifth week of February, if its raining outside you're just spinning your wheels. For software encoders doing DV, the included Main Concept MPEG-2 encoder is about as good as it gets unless you want to spend $$$$$$$$. I'm also a world class pinchpenny. So I won't.

BillyBoy wrote on 5/2/2003, 10:22 PM

While not exactly what you asked, this is an somewhat related article I found the other day interesting judging various CODECS for web playback.

http://www.benwaggoner.com/articles/web_codecs_2001.pdf

swattum wrote on 5/3/2003, 9:08 AM

I've been playing with CCE Basic using the 2 pass VBR to squeeze some extra data onto the DVD without significant loss of quality - seems to work better at the lower data rates than MainConcept.

For general purpose stuff, MainConcept seems to work fine for me though.

I'd be interested in trying something that does more than 2 passes, but I'm not willing to spend the bucks.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/3/2003, 9:31 AM

I had tried a lot of encoders before I bought Vegas and I tweaked TMPGEnc for months to get the best quality I could. Then I bought Vegas and I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the MainConcept encoder and my best TMPGEnc template. I now just use the MainConcept encoder and it looks fine to my eyes. I’m sure there is better for a lot more money but that’s out of my league.

~jr