ProCoder Express

[erratic]

Canopus ProCoder finally has a little brother: ProCoder Express (http://www.canopus.us/US/products/procoder_express/pm_procoder_express.asp) ($59.95).

[DDogg]

Good news, but they don't seem to have a demo.

[erratic]

I read in a German forum (http://www.dvd-svcd-forum.de/phorum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=28;t=15927;st=0) that there will be a 30-day trial version in December.

Meanwhile this is from the Canopus forum:

ProCoder Express does not have...
AC3 encoding (this isn't in ProCoder either)
MPEG Mastering quality
3-2 pulldown flag for MPEG
Audio Filters
Video Filters
Droplets
Projects
Custom presets
One-to-Many encoding
Many-to-Many encoding
Scale&Crop vs Letterbox adjustment
Scale adjustment (Transcoding Options dialog)
Save locations per-target or global
... I'm probably missing a few other things here as well, but you get the idea - for the most part, the "tweaking" features aren't there in ProCoder Express, for obvious reasons.

And here's the first impression from someone who bought ProCoder Express:

I just purchased & downloaded Procoder Express, it's a nice simplified version of Procoder & it plugs into Edius & Premiere Pro quite nicely. I just did a test with a PAL to NTSC conversion, I don't know if it's my imagination but I think it does a better job converting than Procoder LE that's built into Edius. Will do an A-B comparison soon. I'm converting a lot of stuff for my sis-in-law in Canada. I find if I deinterlace the footage in Edius, the converted video doesn't tend to smear like in intrerlaced footage. I did a test with interlaced video in ProCoder EXpress & I'm very happy with the quality! My only gripe but it's not to be unexpected considering where this product is targeted is the wizard always opens by default. I like just to get into the nitty gritty of the settings to output. Other than that I'm happy with it so far, will probably upgrade to the full version when there is more demand of my services.

[SurfDrifter]

I bought Procoder Express and I use for framerate conversions for DVDs.

The quality is very good. Some bugs contained in Procoder 1.5.0.22 have been fixed. And it seems faster.

It has a good feature called "watch folder". Something like batch encoding, but the target settings are the same for all sources.

[DSP8000]

What is the quality difference between Canopus ProCoder Express & CCE?
Any quality tests so far?I've heard that it's using the new engine from Canopus ProCoder v.2.0.

DSP8000