Some people here are using the Dazzle or other gadgets to capture high bitrate mpeg-files, and then convert these files to whitebook-bitrate vcd4s.

My questions:

- How long time does it take to encode for example 1 hour of video this way? (My computer: P 333 Celeron, 64 mb)

- Is it faster to encode mpeg to mpeg, than avi to mpeg?

- is the Panasonic encoder the right encoder to use, or are there other encoders that can do the jobb better or faster?

- Plug-in or stand-alone Panasonic encoder. Which to get?

Thank you all for this intresting site.

Hasse, Sweden

-- Hasse (had@home.se), March 28, 2000

Answers

Encoding times depend on cpu speed and what your actually starting from, if there is a resize of the source material involved then the time will be longer than if the encoder is fed with the correct size. You will also find slower encode times give better results but the Panasonic encoder, which in my view is the best at the moment, has no actual adjustment of encoding speed.

The Panasonic, like most stand alones have a 2G limit on the input file size unless your using W2000.

The plugin for Panasonic is designed for Premiere and has less options available than the stand alone but there are problems with quality when resizing from the timeline.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 28, 2000.

Thanks fvr your answer.

But do you have any exampels on how time consuming this process is.

For example if the original mpeg file is in the right resolution (288 x 352 i think i pal) but captured in 3000 kbit/s.

Does it aproximately take 30 minutes, 1 hour or 5 hours to encode 10 minutes, if you have, let4s say a 333mhz processor.

-- Hasse (had@home.se), March 29, 2000.

are you capturing in mpeg or avi?? i am running at 550mhz with an intel pent 3. An mpeg file at 3000 and lets say runs 30mins will take 2hrs and 30 something mins to convert. a file at that rate and up to 45-50mins takes a liitle over 4 hours to do. So far it seems(when i played around with it) avi and mpeg take the same time to convert in the panasonic. Note though no resizing was done.

-- Doug (mazinz@aol.com), March 29, 2000.

You will not want to hear these figures:

My basis for vcd's is DV source material. My times are slower because I only use a 233mmx and it it said that times are proportional to cpu speed. So here are some times for you, these are based on PAL resizes from 768 x 576 to 352 x 288 and probably not applicable to NTSC.

Dougs example is a 5:1 ratio but does not include re-sizing and contains filtering if I remember correctly so you cannot directly compare my times with his. If you add stills to the mpeg stream the times will increase further.

For whats its worth:

Media Studio Pro 6 timeline resize - 9:1 (poor quality)

Panasonic stand alone encoder 20:1 (excellent quality)

bbMPEG standalone encoder 30:1 (the best output in the tests)

These tests use the same input file, a DV type 2 AVI captured at 3.6M/s or 216M per minute of video, a very clean source that requires generally no noise or video filtering. The output is a standard rate VCD. A full frame encode actually takes about twice the figures given.

I also use the LSX encoder for Mpeg2 and the encoding times for Mpeg2 are similar from the same source material.

For a 466 you can halve the times and filtering will increase the times - in the end who cares if its an overnight encode if the quality is high.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 29, 2000.