http://www.mainconcept.com/downloads.shtml

The renders I have done with 2 pass have been a bit slower than single pass, about 75mins for a 55min avi., but the quality with a very few tweaks is brilliant.

Colours are sharp and when you have movement on movement or moving titles the crispness has to be seen.
Play around with the demo and download the help, follow some of the tweaks and see the result. It also now has scene detection for Mpegs.

I have been using the stand-alone encoder for some time now, just single pass, and am very pleased with it.

It is significantly faster than DVD-A or Vegas.

Perhaps this is a dumb question, but... if one were to purchase this codec, would it be available as an export option from within Vegas? And would one still be able to do the export in such a way that chapter points are preserved for DVD-A, etc...?

TIA.

The reason I ask is that I used to use the Ligos encoder from within Premier; I migrated over to Vegas+DVDA because I really like the way they work together and I like the Vegas interface, but I do think that I got superior results and much smaller file sizes out of the more customizeable Ligos encoder. If I could have my cake (better encoder) and eat it too (still use the Vegas+DVDA project flow), I'd be a happy guy.

Does the standalone encoder provide any bitrate calculator or similar tool so I can encode at the highest possible bitrate, and still just fit on one standard DVD?

Kentwolf,
you say "It is significantly faster than DVD-A or Vegas", but in order to use it, you need to render out Vegast first. So, you make Vegas render to AVI, and then you render AGAIN to mpeg using external encoder.
That's not faster, that's twice slower.

>>Does the standalone encoder provide any bitrate calculator...

Unfortunately, it does not.

I was wishing for that same thing.

If you render AC3 audio, I can see where you'd have a detail gap so you may not know how to calculate.

It would be nice though were it to have a full function bit rate calculator.

>>That's not faster, that's twice slower.

Ya' know, I thought about that, but on my system, it's still much faster.

Also, rendering the AC3 audio takes time. It's still faster for me.

Even going straight in to DVD-A, I had to render to AVI, so those times pretty much cancel each other out, in my view; you have to render to AVI for DVD-A, you have to render to AVI for MPG2 encoding. There is the extra (minimal) time to render the audio, but that's pretty negligible.

Yes, it is (kinda-sorta) a double *process*, but it is hours shorter.

Actually, you could view the MC standalone encoder the same as the DVD-A encoding; just much faster.

With pre-encoded assets, I can make a ready-to-burn final DVD in about 15 to 20 minutes; after the MPG2 and AC3 files are ready and the project all set. It used to take about 6 to 8 hours for DVD-A to crunch my projects; sometimes 9 hours. I had a few 4 hour ones. (AMD Athlon 2400 XP). With the stand-alone encoder, I can render the MPG 2 files in a little faster than real time.

I have also tried built-in MPG encoding in some Adobe products, and it seems pretty comparable to SF/Sony products.

The MC standalone encoder is faster than either of them.

Thank you.

What would be the maximum bit rate to fit 2 hours and 5 minutes on a disc, no motion menus and just straight Video & Audio all-in-one MPEG2? one music file for the single menu screen but file size is negligible. This PC is just a 1.4 ghz and the experimentation with 15:00 chunks takes ages.

Peter

>>...What would be the maximum bit rate...

Assuming using VBR, I would use:

Max: 7584
Avg: 4336
Min: 2600

...fot the video stream only.

This assumes a 3% safety buffer, also assumes (seperately rendered) 192K AC3 audio.

Excellent! Thank you very, very much Mr. Wolf. I'm applying those settings before I go to sleep and with luck, can get this blasted DVD ready for dupliction tomorrow night.

Hot tip: Daisy chaining the DRX 510s does work. However, it may be better to buy a stand alone Microboards 3 banger for 2000 CAD if you want to do three at a time. I have a DRX 500 daisy chained to two DRX 510s (that do have 1394 I/O; maybe early models?) They take a source file from the second device in the chain and write at 4X, no problem. Discs all play fine in the two bottom end cheapo DVD players with nary a glitch.

Peter

I was all ready to buy the standalone, but then I did semi-controlled testing with the new Main Concept standalone MPEG Codec and the default Vegas 4 MainConcept Encoder. Here is what I found:

1) The Standalone has more advanced quality settings, but it is easy to make your output MPEG not DVD Player compatible if you tweak this settings too much. If you need to make DVD player compatible DVDs, the best possible outputs from the stand alone codec and the Vegas 4 codec are nearly identicle.

2) In three tests I tried to match the quality settings of both the Vegas Codec and the Standalone as much as possible. Then I compared the output MPEG quality. If found the Vegas codec produced better quality contrast. Ex. in one scene I had a white sign with black text in bright sunlight, with the Vegas codec I could see all the text clearly, with the standalone codec, I could not see any text. The sign was totally washed out.

In another test, I found that the stand alone codec doesn't handle bright sunlight well. Nearly always washed out. I am pretty sure I had near identicle settings for both codecs in my tests, so I was surprised to find the stand alone codec appeared lower quality.

3) I did find the stand alone had more options for reducing noise/artifacts. However, the Vegas 4 codec output quality was nearly identicle when making DVD player compatible MPEGs.

4) Render times, I found the stand alone to be slightly faster in some cases, but the same in other cases.

Conclusion: If you are making DVDs, then you can stay with the Vegas 4 MainConcept plug-in codec since the DVD compatible output is nearly the same. In fact, as mentioned above, I found the Vegas Codec to be of higher quality for contrast, depth, color. Also, with Vegas codec you can render to MPEG 2 directly from AVI in your timeline. I found the quality to be better this way.

Please let me know if anyone has a different oponion. I tried to do controlled testing, but possible someone has done more in-depth testing with conflicting results.

davidinsg,

This is really useful information. I always appreciate someone who takes the time to do tests.

The only comment I have is that about two months ago, someone reported much faster times, and also better quality with the standalone codec. I was a little surprised at both claims, since we're way down the learning curve on MPEG encoding (over a decade of math wizards trying to optimize it) and it is unlikely that we'll get much additional quality or speed, other than tweaks for specific processor hardware.

You definitely saved me some money. Up until now, I was thinking of getting the standalone encoder. Thanks!

Just to clear a few points, I am in PAL land; P4 2.53 with 512 RAM,

With 2 pass VBR on it takes 1.5 x the video length to render ( note- video only) in standalone encoder.

The quality is very hard to tell from the avi. The most significant points are the quality of moving titles on a moving background, no breakup and the colour saturation and contrast is excellent, I have not been able to acieve this in Vegas or DVDA renders which are slower as well.

Put simply I won't do renders any otherway. Sorry if my experience does'nt match others but that is it. I do tweak the settings but would not put too much emphasis on the tweaks as to final quality.

Excellent bitrate calculator at dvdrhelp.com, in advanced mode will allow you to specify bitrate for audio and specify menu overhead. It's never failed me.

Remember that Vegas effectively frame-serves to its encoder. The stand-alone encoder must make do with compressed AVI (unless of course you are using uncompressed AVI and your disc is as big as Manhattan).

So, theoretically, you should get better performance when rendering from the timeline. But, whatever the theory, only you can be the final arbiter of the quality you're getting. And even if you do believe the multi-pass MC encoder provides better results, that might change if and when Vegas itself provides multi-pass encoding..?

-Pete