Network Render Licenses for MPG/AC3?

2G wrote on 5/26/2004, 9:31 AM

I understand the licensing restrictions for formats like mpg and ac3 that prevent network rendering of those formats. But is there a possibility that you could allow us to purchase additional mpg, etc encoder licenses? One of the big steps in my projects is rendering mpg/ac3 for DVD. To just say we can't network render mpg because the license I have only allows one machine should not be the only answer. If I need another license, sell me one, and let me network render what I need to network render.

Is there another option I've overlooked? (Or is this already available?)

Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 5/26/2004, 9:41 AM

Another option would be to get a MPEG-2 capture card, if you do a LOT of MPEG encoding seems like a no brainer to me and will save you tons of time. There is only so much network rendering can do, if you're willing to buy extra licences, just re-route the money into something more useful.

2G wrote on 5/26/2004, 10:18 AM

Tell me more. I'm not familiar with an MPG capture card. I'm not capturing into MPG. I want to render to MPG. Does this card plug in as a renderer into V5? Does it allow for all the optimization of bit rates / 2-pass / etc? How much time improvement would I expect. Oh yeah... how much $$$?

Thanks.

filmy wrote on 5/26/2004, 10:49 AM

I just found this 2 days ago - it seems like it could be interesting, although "thanks" to Mpeg-LA it is now mpeg2 disabled.

Ympeg

TVCmike wrote on 5/26/2004, 11:14 AM

You know, I was kinda wondering why YMPEG was out for so long with MPEG-2 encoding support for free. I guess it finally caught up with the guy, although I'm sure someone resourceful enough with a search engine could find an old copy.

Jsnkc wrote on 5/26/2004, 11:43 AM

There are tons of MPEG capture cards out there, basically you run your video into the card and it encodes the video to MPEG-2 on the fly so you don't have to render anything, it's completely real time. The card that we have is the SD-1000 card From Sonic and it is amazing for MPEG-2. That card is SDI only, they also have the SD-500 and SD-2000 cards which have analog options. I think these cards are for Mac only, but I know on the PC side there are many oiptions too. I also use a Canopus Amber card, which gives really good results, but I'm sure they have updated the card since I bought it. Just beware that the good cards aren't cheap, normally $1000-$5000, but if you will be doing a lot of MPEG ancoding it is definately worth the investment.

This one looks like the Amber card I have, must be the updated version of it.

http://www.canopus.us/US/products/MVR-D2200/pm_MVR-D2200.asp

Here's the link for more info on the Sonic cards also

http://www.sonic.com/products/sdseries/

SonyPJM wrote on 5/26/2004, 12:32 PM

You can use network rendering to produce MPEG-2 output without
extra licenses. I repeat (only because this has come up several times
before) you CAN!

You just can't use MPEG as the segment format on machines that do not
have their own license. Simply choose something like YUV as the
segment format (or DV if the source material is DV or disk space is a
concern). You can choose the alternate segment format in the Network
Render dialog that appears after the "Render As" dialog.

During the stitching phase, the segments will be encoded as MPEG as

For the highest quality results, you would not want to use MPEG as the
segment format anyway because they will be re-encoded during the
stitch phase.

In the case of AC-3, audio never gets distributed anyway. This is
because temporal effects like reverbs and delays would be messed up at
segment boundaries. For distributed renders, the audio is always
rendered in the stitching phase. For audio-only output formats (AC-3)
you are not given the choice to distribute the render.

However, when it comes to non-distributed renders on a background
machine, I do see your point.

2G wrote on 5/26/2004, 2:43 PM

Thanks for the info. But if all the process intensive mpg encoding is forced to run on my local machine as the stitch host it kinda defeats the purpose. Plus I'm not typically doing distributed anyway.

So you said you see my point.... what are the chances of taking this forward to the product requirements folks for consideration?

Thanks.

2G wrote on 5/26/2004, 2:46 PM

Hmmm, I was kinda in a different ball park. I was sort of assuming that since the entire retail cost of Vegas + DVD was under $1000, the cost of an additional mpeg codec license wouldn't be around $5000. I guess I could be wrong... :-)