My experience backs up the theory that ProCoder works best on interlaced material and Cinemacraft seems to be ever-so-slightly better for progressive. I work in interlaced video almost exclusively, so ProCoder gets my vote. It really does look terrific. However, none of the other encoders you mention are bad by any stretch.

John

Let me answer it the other way around. I wouldn't recommend the mpeg-1 or 2 encoders that Nero sell, they're free / cheap and you really do get what you pay for.
The Cineam Craft Pro is probably the best but at USD 2,500 last time I looked it would damn well want to be!
As to the rest, your guess is as good as mine. I've got TMPGEnc and the MC one that comes with Vegas. I use the TMPGEnc for mpeg-1 at which it really shines for VCD and the MC one for mpeg-2.
At the end of the day what you feed into ANY of them will probably have more bearing on the output than the difference between them.
Remember you're already starting with compromised video, firstly it's most likely interlaced and secondly it's only 4:1:1 or 4:2:0. Anyone at the pointy end of the business just laughs at me (and I can actually see why) when I talk about DV25 to DVD. Sure it looks good to me, until I put up some of their work on a decent monitor.
All that said, your best bet is being able to go straight from the Vegas TL to the encoder, you MAY pickup a slight improvement as Vegas does all it's calcs at a better res and that gets fed to the encoder. So Vegas generated text, CC etc may look a little better.
Apart from that, take your pick, I'd spend more time finessing what you fed any of the encoders than worrying about which encoder.
Unless you're trying for low bitrates any of them should be able to do an excellent job.
Bob.

This article came out last spring. It seems to have been a decent experiment, with blind testing by experts. The result?--CinemaCraft by a mile, though other encoders were more user-friendly.

The article said that all encoders did a decent job at 7Mb/sec (which would be the bitrate used on an 80 minute project), but they were looking specifically at performance at just 3 to 4Mb/sec, which would be the bitrate needed for 2+ hours of video material on a single-layer DVD.

In my own experience, I have done one project that involved slightly over 2 hours of video on a disk, and the results were very satisfactory.

Perhaps the most telling quote is this:

"In the end, the judges agreed that the right encoding tool is undoubtedly the one that best integrates into the user's existing workflow and mindset. Tools that seem too much of a hassle or whose interface is too convoluted will be of little value in one's daily workflow regardless of the sheer quality of output."

Here, here!
No ones ever commented on the quality of the encoding, but they always want it yesterday.
Bob.

Thanks to all who took time to respond.
- riredale: thanks for the link!
How about the Basic Cinema Craft Encoder?
So, according to what you all said, we could rank the enconders this way:
1. CCE and Canopus
2.TMPGENC and MC (some users have already discussed around here that TMPGENC may do a better job than MC).
-So, what do you think?

Hi there....I've just encoded a 3D digital video sequence with Cinema Craf Encoder Basic; CCE SP and Canopus ProCoder 2.0. The encoded sequence is an .AVI file that was made with Lightwave showing a spaceship flying by a nebula. Folks, let me say now that I utterly disagree with all who said CCE is the best choice. Don't know if it's my system (if it's my system fault, I do apologize), but both files encoded with CCE Basic and SP were definitely poor if compared with the one encoded with Canopus. Canopus encoded a ...let's say...a crystal quality file, vivid colors, no distortions, "enfin" absolutely perfect.

I've done extensive testing with all the major encoders (Squeeze, Canopus Procoder, CCE, TMPGenc, MainConcepts and more).

WITHOUT QUESTION and in my humble opinion ( don't really care what a panel or magazine article says, kind of like movie critics saying it's a good movie and it's not) Canopus Procoder is the best MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoder period! CCE comes second.

There is a smoothness and clarity to Procoder 2 that the other encoders just don't have. Using master quality and with good source digital material you're able to work with fairly low datarates. It also has a lot of nifty things like watch folders, video/audio filters, droplets -- it's just a great, great compressionist's tool. I highly recommend it.

MB

I still prefer hardware encoders, they seem to do a better job IMO.

"I still prefer hardware encoders, they seem to do a better job IMO."

Which ones have you had good experience with?

Canopus Procoder is the best MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoder period! CCE comes second

mbelli,

I just got this encoder, but haven't used it yet. For NTSC DV input, do you have settings you would recommend as a starting point?

We've been using the Sonic SD-1000 card for a couple years now and everything we run through it comes out looking great!

I just don't have $2000 to spend on a MPEG encoder (my car isn't worth that much .....)

So, I see that many of the high-end encoders suggested above have entry-level counterparts at $50-150. Which are best for quality and rendering speed? I am doing NTSC DV to DVD.

P.S. I have an older version of Vegas that has the Ligos encoder, not MC. I don't like the Ligos much at all, even my Ulead encoder outdoes it.

Thanks for your input!

the sonic card is hard to beat! Since Sonic basicly controls the highend DVD production market with its products.

Hi there!
I was almost voting for ProCoder, but as I rendered a Targa sequence as MPEG2, which was previously animated with Lightwave 3D - CGI - (guess you've already heard about it), I was surprised with MC. It did the best job. I set my Lightwave cam at 720x480, 0.9 pixel, saving the output as AVI as well as Targa 32 LW. Canopus even at full bitrate got some "banding"; TMPGENC was slightly better than ProCoder and Vegas' MC built-in at 9.800 was the best of them all. Unfortunately I can't upload my pics here but you can kindly go to...
http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?p=224779#post224779
...and if registration is needed to see the pics, please, do it so.
I really don't know what to say. I am almost sure the problem is not with the computer generated image. Sometimes I guess all MPEG encoders are bugged. If not, how can we explain those bandings in those pics???

Banding is most likely not a product of the mpeg-2 encoding as such, that sounds more like a color space conversion issue.
Seeing as how you're coming from a CGI source almost any encoder should be able to do a good job, you shouldn't have any noise to throw it off and you also shouldn't have any full frame motion.
That's why animation looks quite good even on lowly VCDs.
Bob.

Banding is most likely not a product of the mpeg-2 encoding as such, that sounds more like a color space conversion issue.
...
Did you go there to see my pics. What do u suggest me do?

i use a philips 80 with firewire in set to hq. burn to rw disk, transfer file to computer and create with dvlab.

best encoding i've seen against most software ones (tried them all, legally and cracked to decide which to buy), and decided that mc in vv4 was fine enough for mpg2, but not as good as philips....

leslie

Thanks for the info on philips (never heard of such a product, though)...
In fact I am starting to realize all MPEG encoders don't work well. If the problem was re-rendering VOB files as MPEG ones, etc...I would undertand all the "banding". But no way, this is a perfect sequence of TGA files made with Lightwave (3D Software - CGI). That's why I don't understand all the banding here. I suspect that might be the MPEG compressors themselves because if I render the whole thing as MPEG2 using the highest bitrate (Vegas MC built-in - NTSC DVDA video stream at 9.800), banding is highly reduced. I said reduced. Just reduced.

the "shoot out" at http://videosystems.com/mag/video_mpeg_encoder_shootout/

mentioned above is somewhat flawed as they used default settings (and wrong settings) for a number of encoders -- it could be said that the default should be decent quality -- but you can not.

i replyed to you on banding in another forum - link below
I think you already did some of what i told you to do and it helped greatly you stated ..,.

if you want -- contact me and arange to send me a seq. and i will encode it for you with no banding ..

http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=243319&highlight=

the sonic hardware encoder mentioned above is great , so are some of the old spruce encoders as well as other high end encoders .. a hardware encoder is just a software encoder , with the program/code burned on a chip.

best mpeg encoding that can make even the worse encoders look alright is perfect source files .. biggest issue i see is problems with the source files (specially some sent to me shot on DV) , usually can be fixed up.

http://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=235665&highlight=

I've had this same problem. Extremely high res stills, 12 MB tiffs of some very attractive models on a grey background. The grey background broke down into 4 areas with sharp edges between then, each about 100 pixels wide, looked truly horrid.
But that was even before I encoded to mpeg-2, that was straight off the Vegas T/L!
When I opened the stills in PS, PS said the image used a custom colorspace but I used the default colorspace to open them and they looked OK in PS. I saved them as .PNG at a much lower res (they were chocking Vegas) and the banding went away.
I'm suspecting this really has more to do with something like the RGB->YUV conversion than the mpeg-2 encoding but without the source files it's hard to prove one way or another.
Bob.