Any Better Encoders Than MainConcept?

Hello Everyone :-)

I am not sure that I am thrilled with the quality of the MainConcept engines in
Premiere CS3 and Encore CS3.

I have recently been forced to deal with an issue that made me start questioning
this. A client of mine plays my DVDs at conferences and projects them onto a big
screen. That would be OK, but he uses MS Media Player and plays it in Full
Screen Mode. This is more than 200% of the original size, so the quality takes a
big hit.

So I started comparing My DVDs with some DVDs that I got from commercial sources
and did a side-by-side comparison.

The commercially available DVDs held up much better. I know that the source
material makes a big difference, but I used similar source footage as the
commercial stuff, and still they looked better.

What do you think of the MainConcept encoder, and what others would you say
would give me better results?

Harm, you're the Man!

I don't mind spending the bucks, if I get the job done. For 2K, if it isn't much
better than Cleaner or ProCoder, I'd rather go with one of those. I'll look into
Cinemacraft Encoder SP but what do you think would give me better results than
the Adobe MainConcept encoder for a reasonable price?

Marotti,

From our encounters elswhere (Canopus site) I distinctly remember you are in a
different league than I am (being a mere hobbyist myself) but even from my point
of view I find it hard to see a noticeable difference between the various
encoders. Cinemacraft Basic is somewhat softer than Media Encoder (I have never
tried SP, since it is out of my league), Procoder I have tried, but due to some
incompatibilities with Encore 2.0 I gave up on that.

Well Harm, you are way too modest. I value your knowledge even more than the
guys that I work with that have the heavy rigs. We, with the lighter wallets,
have to stretch and get clever just to come close to the kind of results that we
want to achieve.

I personally shouldn't be doing this stuff anyway, but I can't stop, I'm a
little addicted. I obsess over the little things, in fact the client didn't even
complain about this until I told him that I wasn't satisfied with the results
:-(

I just want to know that I did everything in my power and capability to deliver
the best product possible. This was only a $15K project so I wanted to do most
of the work on it myself. It is a big client though that gives me business all
year round, up and down the East Coast, so I gotsta keep him happy! The good
news is that I am learning something new that I can utilize when I offload this
stuff to my team mates.

Back to the topic though. I can tell the difference and especially the way this
guy is using it. I want some reassurance that the MainConcept encoder is good
enough to not have to spend any money on another solution that might not give me
the amount of improvement to make it worth while.

I am going to download trial versions of the top encoders and do some testing.
I'm thinking; ProCoder (still not happy with Canopus though), Cleaner,
CinemaCraftEncoder Basic, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress.

Can you think of any others?