[Alan Smith] "We shoot everything in HD but are only creating SD DVD's."
While Compressor can do this very easily, this does create a VERY long render in Compressor. First it has to rescale and reverse the field order as HD is Upper Field First and (in NTSC) SD is Lower Field First, THEN it creates the MPEG-2 on top of that. Takes longer than just creating an SD MPEG-2 from an SD file.
When we have to do a long HD to SD DVD, we will literally master the proect out to HD Tape, Recapture the project downconverted to SD via our Kona 3 and then run the project through Compressor. This is actually faster than letting it all happen through Compressor.
However, all that being said, Innobits has greatly improved BitVice so it now takes advantage of the multiple cores in the Mac Pro Intel machines and it renders in darn near realtime speed on an 8 core machine. I compressed 5 - 26 minute shows in about 33 minutes each this past week using the latest BitVice 1.8. The quality difference between Compressor and BitVice is night and day. I've avoided BitVice for the past two years because the render times were atrocious. But now I would highly recommend it if you're looking for top quality SD MPEG-2's at a fast render time. They have an HD encoder coming soon and I'm anxious to try that out as soon as possible for our BluRay projects.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
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