Procoder or CCE?Which one will produce better quality?

[konnak]

Well the question is simple.What do you think from your experience?

Also, since I don't have any DV driver installed (neither canopus nor panasonic)-I seem to think that frameserving from Premiere itself and using MS native driver, will keep most of the quality intact-can I use the AVISynth's FixBrokenChromaUpsampling filter, or I shouldn't bother at all?
Also, I know that with CCE I can use AVISynth's filters, by making an AVS file and load it to CCE. Can I do the same with canopus?do you know a way?

[ronnylov]

In my opinion it is possible to get better quality with Canopus Procoder than CCE when encoding interlaced DV to mpeg2 but you should use the "mastering quality" setting in procoder. Another option is to use Mainconcept encoder 1.4 because it seems as good as or even better than Procoder because it's more tweakable and it gives slightly better quality in my opinion at least at high bitrates and you can also tweak the quantizer matrices a bit to improve the quality. The mainconcept encoder is also cheaper than Procoder.

It is possible to frameserve from avisynth to Procoder if you create a dummy avi file with Link2 or VFAPI and load that into Procoder.

I'm not sure about using MS native DV codec. Many seems to prefer Canopus DV codec. Read the sticky thread about the different codecs and what settings to use.

Quality is a very subjective matter and you'll get different answers depending on who you ask. Some people prefers a soft image and other want a sharp image. I suggest that you try the demo versions and make your own opinion before you decide what encoder you should buy.

[konnak]

Well another question: how much time does procoder take to encode 59 mins of interlaced DV footage in mastering quality, and, to the contrary, CCE?
To be honest though I expected that more people would have experience from both programs, but no posts...

[ronnylov]

CCE is much faster than Procoder. I did a one pass CBR encoding and CCE needed 10 minutes where Procoder needed 30 minutes. Mainconcept encoder was faster than Procoder but slower than CCE, but I guess it depends on settings and the source video too.

[bb]

Procoder 1.5.x is told to support AviSynth, but the older version I tried (1.01.08) did not.

Whether Procoder is better or CCE, MainConcept or TMPGEnc is more or less a matter of taste. At least they play in the same league. As far as I remember Procoder has a special way of encoding interlaced material which should make it superior for interlaced sources, but there was some discussion about compatibility problems with standalone players, too.

If you use the search button you'll find a lot of discussion and information about the questions you asked. That's probably the reason why you didn't get many answers - not many people like to repeat themselves...

bb