Main Concept quality & one mpeg VBR question

Jamz wrote on 11/23/2001, 3:25 AM
After being a bit hard on Main Concept because on rendering you can't produce separate elementary video & audio files I was determined to see if it's good anyway so I downloaded TMPG for the de-multiplexer & tested a clip rendered in main concept & burned it to a dvd-rw. The quality is amazing. I've had much success with ligos in the past but Sonic Foundry outdid themselves on putting together VV3 with this encoder. I know MC has an excellent DV Codec but I never knew of any mpeg encoder by them. I saw from another post they just license their product out but what encoder is using it? I'm impressed. One question-If I render a VBR & the max setting is at 8000, using PCM audio this puts the combined overall rate around 9.5 which is close to the maximum allowed by DVD. Does the maximum tend to go beyond that point say to 8300 or does this encoder stay true to it's settings. I know the Ligos plugin to premiere always went slightly beyond what it was supposed to. It looks like all my video editing will be done with VV3. Keep up the good work & I'll be anxiously waiting for the update to address the elementary stream issue.

Comments

MCTech wrote on 11/26/2001, 4:29 PM
Jamz,

One of our developers did some testing and found that the encoder stays very close to the target bitrate, but there is a little margin for error. It would be possible to program it to be more exact, but encoding speed would suffer if too much attention was focused on maintaining the target rate. The material being encoded also has some effect on the accuracy.

In general, you should have no problems. The only potential trouble area the developer noted would be if you set your average bitrate very close to the max. But as long as the average is a good bit below the max, you should be fine.

I hope this helps.

MainConcept Tech Support
Jamz wrote on 11/27/2001, 1:52 PM
Before I saw the quality of the presets, I had the average around 7200 & that along with uncompressed PCM audio made the combined bit rate to hit between 9.3 & 9.8 a little to often & way too close to falling out of DVD specs for me. So I see what you mean about getting close to the video bitrate maximum of 8.0. I only encoded the first one at 7200 because of what I was used to with the Ligos premiere plugin.
Veasna wrote on 11/27/2001, 3:27 PM
As an aside question for our Main Concept person, is there a maximum interval during which a VBR DVD stream can reach the DVD video maximum of 9.8 Mbps?

Thanks,
-Veasna
SonySDB wrote on 11/28/2001, 8:44 AM
As long as it doesn't go over 9.8 Mbps, there is no maximum interval.