SPECIAL THANKS TO Chrys Zaglifa - couldn't havet figured this out without you.

If you're a seasoned professoinal with cleaner,supercharger,etc.. then what I'm about to say is going to be old news to you - please don't write me to tell me how outdated this piece of info is - due to recent posts (see below for snippets) i'm led to believe that I'm not the only one who was unaware of what I'm going to reveal. What I discovered was amazingly valuable to an average joe guy like me and I wanted to pass this on to all of you out there, who, like me, simply don't have $3500 to throw at an mpeg encoder, yet desperately need something better than what we've been promised by apple. Here's some short snippets from recent posts to the cleaner list (and other lists I think):

Questions or comments can be directed HERE

--------

On 11/14/01 10:59 AM, Moving Image (movimage@netunlimited.net) said:

>I have Charger and Supercharger on a G4 Twin processor 450. Works Great.>Yesterday I compressed a 2:30 video to MPEG-2 for DVD (9.0 MBper sec) in >about 16 minutes. I also took the same 2:30 video and compressed it into >MPEG-1, 320 X 240, 30 MB file size limit in about 48 minutes. How does that >compare with your times?

On 11/14/01 5:08 PM, David Ross (Rossphile@home.com) said:

>I may be missing something, but aren't those horrible numbers?

On 11/14/01 5:36 PM, Piers McDonald (pmcdonald@adimex.com.au) said: >Yes we do get almost real time encoding from QuickTime, at pretty >remarkable quality, but when you compare it to the quality you can achieve >with Cleaner Charger or SuperCharger it is terrible.

On 11/14/01 5:37 PM, Moving Image (movimage@netunlimited.net) said:

>Is there a trade off whereby it takes forever but >you get lots of choices about how to do it?

-------

David - I agree with you - those are horrible numbers for day to day encoding. And Piers, I agree with you as well. The Apple encoder, though great for home users, is a nuclear warhead aimed at your business if you try and sell their end product to anyone. And to "moving image" - yes, there's a wonderful trade off for those of us who just need to encode professionally and don't need all the extra options.

You can add REAL TIME, PROFESIONAL level mpeg2 encoding to your mac for betwen $300-$500 (I did it for $300). The hardware for this solution is pc compatable, don't know if the free software I found is made for pc as well though.

I'll give the brief detail for those who don't want to read this whole article (it's quite long I know) and then detail it for those who want more info. Three things you need to know:

  1. HARDWARE: Cleaner Supercharger (buy a used one on ebay for $300-$500) -
  2. SOFTWARE - forget cleaner - FREE SOFTWARE! click this link:
      1. VERSION 1.0.1 DMP SOFTWARE <-- Couldn't get this one to work at all - might be better for older macs, etc...
      2. VERSION 1.1.1 DMP SOFTWARE <-- this is the one I found to work best with my G4/733/Superdrive
      3. VERSION 1.1.2 DMP SOFTWARE <-- this one is expired, but I've heard it said that it's the best to use if you just set your mac's clock back (can't beat free real time encoding, even if it means setting your clock back).
      4. VERSION 1.1.2 DMP SOFTWARE (Non-Expiring) <-- Apparantly, this one is a non expiring version of #3, but I'm unable to test at the moment as I have sold my G4 in anticipation of the new machines coming from Apple. Feel free to download and let me know if it's functional. Thanks to Boris Herman for this one.
  3. REMEMBER - THIS SOLUTION IS NOT FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO NEED TO CROP OR NEED TONS OF OPTIONS FOR ENCODING. If you need these extra options, this is not the solution for you. However, if you are the type of person who can say: I want real time mpeg 2 encoding, I want it cheap, i just want the final product to look exactly like my original wihtout all the tweaking - then hang on to your hats - the results are absolutely amazing - phenominal to be exact.

DETAILS: The dilemma I faced is the same as everyone else: speed, price, quality - pick two.

I don't wanna pick two though - especially since it's obvious that the bottom is about to drop out of cost for hardware encoding. A board that's worth $3500 today will likely be nothing more than a doorstop in less than a year when this happens.. who has $3500 to throw away, not me...

For those of you who don't know - it turns out that the supercharger is actually not a supercharger at all - it's a Wired Digital Media Press board. Apparantly the folks at m100 (when it was theirs) decided to give cleaner a little extra power (and when you discover what the board can do, you'll see it was VERY little) by charging up cleaner with it.

Right now our options for high quality encoding cheaply are as follows:

  1. Apple encoder - software based, not suited for anything more than home video, encodes in 2x time though so considering it's encode time, it's a nice deal if you can get away with the lower quality.
  2. Cleaner - Quality is 5-10x better than apple's even on a bad day, but a 90 minute movie takes 30+ hours and tweaking takes forever for noobies like me.
  3. Cleaner + charger - you can produce some pretty phenominal end quality with this combinaiton, but once again be prepared to be without your computer for several days as it encodes
  4. Cleaner + supercharger - (you can't use cleaner, charger and supercharger - its either #3 or #4) - Although superhcarger effectively cuts your time in half, $1000 is too much (imntbho) to be spending on a board that still takes 15+ hours to encode and doesn't even provide 2 pass vbr. Effectively - although m100 accelerates cleaner encoding, the board is only being used at 40% it's actual capacity and abillity as it can encodein real time AND do vbr, etc...
  5. Heuris and Other Software Encoders - If you're going to venture outside of the 4 optiones mentioned above, the only other software encoder I'd reccomend is Heuris's encoder (http://www.heuris.com/). Many claim that it's $1000 price tag is justified by it's superior final output over all of the competition. However, In my real world test I found two things: 1. The interface was archaic and hard to navigate. 2. The basic cleaner package seemed to output much better quality than the heuris encoder in my opinion. It is possible that I had something set or tweaked wrong given my lack of ability to navigate the interface, but given their claims, at least the basic encode should have produce at least as good of results as the cleaner package and it did not. Therefore I'm leaving it out of this discussion other than to say that encoding time is approx. 30+ hours for the 90 minute movie disucssed below.

Something else I've noticed about Cleaner is that although the options are wonderful, a guy like me doesn't want to fiddle with 5000 buttons and controls. I like the way my movie looks in FCP and spent too much time editing to have to now go back and re-tweak for another format. However, both the apple and cleaner encoding systems suffer from the same evil demon: dark scenes are too dark. It's a sad day with the apple encoder as there's nothing you can do about this. Cleaner, however, gives lots of options for adjusting this and with lots of time tweaking, you can probably get it just right.

Real world results: All results are based on a 90 minute exoprt from FCP:

APPLE encoder produced:

CLEANER encoder produced:

CLEANER w/ CHARGER encoder produced:

CLEANER w/ SUPERHCARGER encoder produced:

SUPERHCARGER w/ free software:

OFFICIAL MEDIA100 SOFTWARE FOR DMP

_Ray