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| Posted by | Dennis |
| Posted on | 24/12/03 13:08 |
| Number of views | 35328 |
Now that we've set-up our movie we can start the encoding process. After pressing the next button we can see the burn window which offers us some more options. First of all we can set the burn options. We can burn our encoded movie straight to CD or DVD or we can simply copy it to a folder on our hard disk. Besides the burn option we have another option called "Nero Digital Settings". This option allows us to tweak the Nero Digital codec.
We can choose from fast encoding (one pass) and high quality encoding (two passes). But when we select the expert mode option we get complete control over the Nero Digital codec. Here we can find the following settings:
- Codec thread priority which ranges from idle to time critical
- Encoding method:
- fast (one pass) and high quality (two passes)
- minimum and maximum quantizer
- Quality/Speed:
- performance/quality ranging from fastest encoding to best quality
- motion search
- NC prediction
- scene cut
- fast ME
- low noise and high noise
- high BVOP quantisation
- maximum RV range
- psycho-visual quality level
- Advanced:
- simple profile (QuickTime compatibility)
- MPEG or H263 quantisation
- spatial prediction
- predicted VOP
- unrestricted motion vectors
- 4 motions vectors per macroblock
- bidirectional VOP
- support of interlaced VOP
- global motion compensation
- Keyframes:
- mimimum and maximum keyframe interval
- Matrices:
- intra and inter matrices
As you can see from these option the expert mode is only intended for experienced users. Because most users will most likely keep the original settings we didn't use the expert mode and let Nero Recode 2 control all the settings. We used the best quality mode which uses two passes. The encoding process took around two hours on our test machine (1.74GHz Athlon XP with 512MB RAM). When the encoding process was complete we got one 680MB .MP4 file on our hard disk. The file could, of course, be played with Nero's ShowTime player:
When we played the created file with Nero ShowTime we were actually very surprised with the produced quality. When you think of the fact that the original DVD movie was over 7GB in size and the created .MP4 file is less than 700MB you would expect the movie quality to be very poor. This was not the case! Below we've taken some screenshots in which you can see that the picture is of very decent quality. The quality was not as good as the original DVD but as said, when you compress a movie to 10% of its original size you're bound to sacrifice some quality.
Another great thing about the .MP4 file is that it contains a chapter index and subtitles are also added to the stream. Via Nero ShowTime we can easily select which scene we want to skip to and if we want to display subtitles or not:
This review of the Nero Recode software and the Nero Digital codec would of course not be complete if we didn't compare the codec to some of its most important competitors, namely DivX and XViD. Continue reading on the next page to find out more!
Nero Digital
I'm also looking forward to a test that also includes RealVideo 9 and Quicktime. Those codecs are also better than DivX.
gonna play with some settings.
What i ask myself is, how popular will this became
I think that with more adecuated captures the diferences between codecs would show easily.
Not suspicious but i don't like it.
To compare on my own I encoded the movie , Bend It Like Beckham, with Recode 2 using its default settings to a, dual pass, 705MB file size. Mind you the bitrate was noted as higher than when I encoded the same movie with DrDivx, the difference being the audio. DrDivx was also encoded using dual-pass, and standrard high definition certification levels. DrDivx uses mp3 (I can't seem to get an answer as to whether it is the standard codec or the Pro version) and I encoded at 128kbps. Hence the video bitrate allocated for the Divx file was less than that for Recode2. DrDivx, in light of the additional audio bitrate, also resized the video to a smaller size to account for the video bitrate decrease. To accomodate this I resized the window to the size indicated for the Recode2 version.
Even given these changes, lower overall video bitrate stretched to non-ideal frame size, The Divx file by in large showed less blockiness and even a more crisp picture. The Recode2 image in general looked softer and slightly foggy. So in case you haven't gotten my drift, I disagree with the results of the review. Given time I'd be willing to post my screen shots if anyone is interested.
Lastly I do appreciate the reviewer taking a novices perspective in the review. I would be curious (and am intending to explore) the encoding fps and quality when the expert setting are all turned on. Yes Recode2 is drastically faster at encoding than the Dr/Divx codec but at what cost? I'm more than willing to set up Dr.Divx to encode at its highest quality settings, dual, and then nth pass if it means a better picture than a more speedy codec. I'm excited bout the possibility of DrDivx incorporating AAC into their software! I hope it happens!
Ok ok, I'm done now.
For your other questions, Dennis (the reviewer) will likely be better able to answer them.
I'm quite satisfied with the performance of Nero Digital.
Besides, I find Nero Recode to be a simple program that will give me good quality videos with AC-3 audio - all in a neat package.
I can't really comment on quality as I can't really see any difference due to the fact that AutoGK's default settings are better than most OS conversion software.
However, I can say that to my surprise my comparison shows the exact opposite of Dennis' review.
I have found AutoGK a lot faster at producing comparable results.
I am not sure why but on my set-up Nero Recode's 3 2-pass to AVC takes almost 3 hrs whilst the same movie takes about 1 hr 40 min on AutoGK's 2-pass encoding to Xvid.
I was very disappointed after all the hype about Nero Recode's two pass encoding speed and was hoping to use the the new H.264 codec to backup my movie collection.
Coincidently, I also noticed that AutoGK's 1-pass Target Quality Encoding is far better and faster than Recode's 1-pass encoding and can render a high quality backup with a target quality setting of 60% in about 1 hr on my setup. (the down side is that you cannot specify target size, though, the average output size is between 900MB - 1300MB which is exactly what I need any way as I'm backing-up to my HD)
I'm going to try other OS softwares SUPER and MeGui to see if they are any faster. I'll let you know how that goes.
I'm using a Dual Core 2 CPU 2.00 GHZ with 4GB or Ram.
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