Canopus Procorder

[ehickert]

I have been running some initial tests with the Canopus Procorder software to render VCD, SVCD as the output for my DV material.

First impressions are very high! I have achieved new levels of quality in my VCD and SVCD material. I will be doing some tests with DV to DVD shortly and will post those results.

I have not been able to get the DVD2SVCD/CCE2.5 combination to achieve the same level of quality as the Procorder solution. Caveat, these comments only apply to the SVCD output on good quality DV material. DVD2SVCD still offers you incredible flexibility to configure and add filters in order to correct DV material.

Has anyone had further experience with the Procorder?

[sh0dan]

First impression: Expensive as ****!
Second impression: Doesn't support AviSynth files. :(

Filters: Where are all the good filters? Windows Media Encoder has better filters! TMPGEnc has much better filters.

Speed: Ok speed. It's not without reason it isn't compared to CCE in their "speed tests" - an Avisynth/CCE/TMPG comparision, when resize and IVTC/Deinterlacing is used, will probably make Procoder loose.

If Procoder is supposed to compete with Cleaner, it has won - easy job - cleaner is the most crappy piece of compression software I've ever known - incredibly slow, mostly bad quality.

Procoder still has a long way to go before beating AviSynth/TMPG for MPEG1 and AviSynth/CCE for MPEG2, speedwise and filterwise.

[ronnylov]

I thought Procoder was less expensive than CCE? It still is expensive like **** but CCE is also expensive...

Anyway I agree with ehickert. The quality of Procoder beats CCE and TMPGEnc at low MPEG2 bitrates as used in SVCD. I used Link2 to open avisynth in Procoder and it worked. Procoder is much less flexible but still the results are excellent when "mastering quality" is used. At DVD bitrates or when encoding from progressive DVD sources (movies) I think the differencies are less obvious.

I have only tried CCE version 2.50. Perhaps the results are different with the newer versions? I could also have used wrong settings but it was easier to get good results with Procoder.

[ehickert]

The Procorder is not a universal solution for SVCD, VCD or even DVD. But it does have it's place in our toolbox of video encoding solutions. I find it an excellent solution for quickly converting some of my DVD and DV material to SVCD or even VCD.

What is surprising is that it really does have excellent encoding quality in spite of it's over-simplistic front-end. I just read that the V1.2 will have some important improvements for the Mpeg codec and added functionality.

Regarding cost, well it is much cheaper than Cinema Craft's Standard Mpeg codec and I am sure that it is also available from alterante channels. What isn't?

My tests have been limited to converting DV material to SVCD and VCD. There is a very slight softening of the picture, but the overall quality is outstanding. I have not achieved this quality with any other tools as of yet and the process is very easy and relatively quick. It is also supposed to be a very competent format converter NTSC-PAL although I personally have not tried it.

Only time and more tests will let me better understand it's performance envelope and it's correct place in my personal video toolbox.

If you have any experience with Procorder, please share it with this forum.

Thanks,

[waldok]

Damn, this is hell of a surprise I had !

I always thought nothing would beat DVD2SVCD, although I wasn't exaggerately impressed by the AVI2SVCD conversion from DV source. I thought the kind of artefacts I had were due to DV encoding.
Now I gave Procoder and DVD2SVCD a try on the very same sequence, used CBR 2520, no deinterlace, same field orderd in both cases and voila : Procorder wins. No doubt, no discussion, the image is crisper, clearer, almost identical to the original DV footage...
THe image I got from DVD2SVCD is a little more blurry and clearly shows some artefacts in flat uniform areas...

What a surprise ! OK, it takes longer to encode, no doubt about it. OK, the final file is a bit bigger (for my 30 seconds or so sequence, I got a final MPEG file of 9807K with DVD2SVCD and 10295K with Procoder, 400K difference is no big deal).

Now I must admit that if DVD2SVCD still rules (and for a long time I guess) for DVD backups, Procoder is the one I'll use for AVI encodings...
Yet, this was a fast test, so I'll have to give the latest DVD2SVCD release candidate a try, and also try "the real thing" on both software, on a 1h or so sequence.

I'll let you guys know. Other advices are welcome, let's compare our experience here...

Waldok :cool:

[bb]

waldok, what were your settings?

bb

[waldok]

Hi BB,

Sorry I'm at work right now so I don't have all settings in front of me. As far as I can remember here is what I used :

Source : MIni DV PAL
Transferred to AVI DV using Belkin FIrewire card (who cares :D)
Encoding : SVCD PAL 480 x 576
Video Bitrate : 2520 kbs (Procoder wouldn't allow more under the SVCD template)
Audio bitrate : 192 kbs
Field order : lower field/Odd on source and lower field/Odd on destination (strange Procoder names for field order)
Quality : mastering quality

I think that's all I can remember.
Oh yes, PC is Celeron II 566@850

Takes time to encode (approximately 6 times more than real-time) but quality is great. In the meantime I tried the same on old analog 8mm tapes from camcorder, previously captured to AVI with Virtual DUb and Picvideo MJPEG codec at max quality. Just had to reverse field order and the results obtained with Procoder are amazing once again.
I never had such a crisp picture from my old tapes before.

If you need more info, just ask, I'll answer you from home with all the details.

Waldok :cool:

[bb]

Thank you for your reply. Up to now I do not have any experience with Procoder, so I'm interested in any opinions. If you have more details regarding the Procoder setup, I'd appreciate it.

Comparing with AVI2SVCD, did you use CCE or TMPGEnc? What were the AVI2SVCD settings in your comparison?

bb

[ronnylov]

WarpEnterprises posted a comparison between TMPGEnc and Procoder in the avisynth forum: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34310

Maybe his test method could be used also in comparison with CCE and with different sources and settings?

[sh0dan]

There is a "Using Ligos MPEG tools" on the box, so it's probably using the Ligos MPEG encoder.

I have tried Ligos 3.5, but stangely enough it doesn't contain any 2 pass mode. It seems like the canopus folks has done a good job of adapting the Ligos code - I must give you that the MPEG2 mode gives very good results.

I'll also try to see if I can get in touch with the canopus folks about AviSynth support. Maybe they're just testing the extension, and assuming that if the extension isn't .AVI then it isn't an AVI file.

[ehickert]

I am glad that more people are giving the Procorder a shot. It would be great to be able to use Avisynth for preprocessing and then to code with Procoder. ronnylov mentioned (above) the use of Link2 as a way to combine Avisynth and Procoder. Has anyone tried this?

It appears that Procorder is also doing some sort of complex processing/filtering before the actual coding. Does anyone have any additional information on this?

Lastly, regarding the CODEC they use, I believe it is proprietary to Canopus. I don't believe they use the Ligos codec for coding. I think they use the Ligos codec only in the Decoding process (for Mpeg sources).

[waldok]

@BB

I used to use CCE in AVI2SVCD (what? Sure I bought it, it is soooo cheap :rolleyes: )

OK, I'm still at work so I don't have my settings here at hand once again, but strangely I even tried higher bitrates with CCE (XSVCD stuff you know about, like 3.3 MBits/s (which my standalone plays without a problem). Yet, I still have less mosquito noise with Procoder and the picture really is "nicer" (ok, that's a subjective one), just more like the original footage (all people around me agreed on this when watching both CCE and Procode results).

From what I remember, here are some settings I used with AVI2SVCD/CCE :

- Video bitrate CBR usually 2600
- Audio 192 kbs
- Bicubic resize 0.6;0.6 (for DV footage)
- No other filtering involved

I'll try to put a more detailed report on the settings I used with both encoders, but this will take a few days cause my work doesn't leave me too much spare time at the moment :mad:

Waldok :cool: