Good news! - Mac Version Cinemacraft Encoder (Compressor Plugin)
by Mitch Sink
on
Apr 14, 2008 at 6:35:12 pm
Hi,
Good news!
I talked to Ray at Omni-Cinema Craft a few weeks ago and he told me they are pretty far along with testing their CCE-MP Compressor Plug-in. He asked me not to say anything until they are ready for a formal announcement. He said the code is the same as their Cinema Craft Xtream, which I think is their high end Hardware encoder. He said on a 8 core Mac Pro each pass is about 9x faster than RT. He said that they are tentatively planning on a price in the $500 to $800 range. I just received the following in an email from Omni (it sounds like Brian is giving a demo, probably at NAB):
Thanks for your interest in CCE-MP.
You can now tell your friends and we invite you to go ahead a post to wherever you like. Thanks for your patience. Product will be shipping in the first part of May 2008, and price will be available shortly.
You can now tell your friends and we invite you to go ahead a post to
creative cow or wherever you' like.
This session will herald in a new era of MPEG-2 encoding for optical media inside Final Cut Studio with the debut of Cinema Craft's MP Compressor Plugin. Based on the highly successful QuickTime Components architecture, the Plugin fits right into the standard Compressor workflow alongside the built in presets. Until now, the encoder engine inside CinemaCraft Encoder MP was used only for Cinema Craft Xtream, the "on-line" high end system that set the bench mark with high quality, Hollywood DVD titles. With the debut of Cinema Craft MP, Hollywood quality MPEG-2 encoding is now available for the Mac. Brian will go in depth with the Cinema Craft MP Compressor Plugin by walking through all the major components and settings. He'll also demonstrate real-world workflows for both television and feature film optical delivery that originate with Standard and High Definition content.
CINEMA CRAFT Encoder MP is a plug-in developed for Compressor 3, the audio/video encoding application that is included with Apple's Final Cut Studio 2.
Until now, this encoder engine inside CinemaCraft Encoder MP was used only for the Cinema Craft Xtream, the "on-line" high end system that set the bench mark quality Standard for Hollywood DVD titles. This DVD standard for Hollywood quality MPEG-2 is now available for the Mac. CinemaCraft Encoder MP allows Final Cut Studio 2 users to encode their content to world class high-quality MPEG-2 files for DVD authoring without changing their workflow.
Call OMNI at (949)760-6664 to Find Out More About the New CINEMA CRAFT Encoder MP
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation by Alexander Kallas on Apr 14, 2008 at 11:58:50 pm
[Michael Sacci]"Was ready to buy the PC version, downloaded the trial version and set up XP on my MBP last night, just I can wait this sounds like a sweat deal!"
Interestingly I have just purchased the basic version and am running a direct comparison
with Compressor.
I know you favour CBR, so I have encoded in both at the same data rate, and will burn both and report.
Cinemacraft also has an option for computer-generated text, that will be interesting to compare menus generation. There is also a 2-pass CBR option, which I am trying.
BTW Michael, how do you plan to move the files to the Mac side? I am using Macdrive.
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation by Michael Sacci on Apr 15, 2008 at 12:04:19 am
I'm first going to try VMware Fusion and see how it does with just a shared drive, if that doesn't work MacDrive would be the way I go. When DL first came out DVDSP didn't support it so I have to burn projects with a PC and MacDrive worked great for that.
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation by Mitch Sink on Apr 15, 2008 at 12:24:45 am
Hi,
When I talked to Ray about this he said the code in the Compressor Plugin is based on their extreme which he said is better than the Cinema Craft SP.
I asked about the multiple pass encodes (available with SP and the Compressor Version). He said each pass analyzes the bitstream and reallocates the bits where there can be an improvement. So rather than tweak the settings and re-encode individual segments manually you can just set it for a fairly high number (which is not a big deal at 9x RT) and just let it go to work. He said 9x would normally be sufficient, even for very demanding material.
I suggested a quality slider might be an improved way to control the number of encodes as the SW should be able to determine how much improvement is happening after each pass.
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation by david bogie on Apr 15, 2008 at 8:42:09 pm
I can't see anything on their site that indicates a price. Jut a contact us button, which usually implies it is VERY expensive. Anyone know if this is realworld competitive or just a toy for the big dogs?
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: "For crying out loud, read the freakin' manual."
I told him I thought that they would have made a lot more money with CC-SP if they had priced it for less. He agreed and said he was considering prices in the $499 to $799 range. The product is basically done so the major product details are very firm.
On the other hand because the price is more likely to change I considered not even mentioning a price. But based on what he said and the tone of our conversation I think it will probably either be in or very close to the above range.
Even if it is higher I would be very very surprised if its over $1k which is pretty high but compared with the price of CC SP, plus the fact it will run under OSX, plus the fact it is a superior product (comparable to CC xtreme rather than CC SP) it should still be a very good deal.
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation by Michael Sacci on Apr 16, 2008 at 2:54:39 am
Pricing is an interesting dynamic, for something like this I think a lot of us want it to be a little more higher then normal to help keep it out of range of the causal user without to too expensive. I think the 500-800 keeps that balance. Really excited about this coming to the mac.
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation- Keep it cheap for quantity of sales. by Noah Kadner on Apr 19, 2008 at 12:47:24 am
It's gonna be a tough sell over $200 IMHO. Most folks are more than happy with the quality of MPEG-2 compression they get "free" with Compressor. Asking 500-800 when all of Final Cut Studio costs $1,200 is going to translate into very low quantity of sales IMHO. At $99 they'll get a lot of takers. Sorry but a lot FCP editors are cheap. I mean let's be real- I know a *lot* of "pro" houses that offer client DVDs made with iDVD..... Anyways that's my $.02.
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation- Keep it cheap for quantity of sales. by Alex Asp on Apr 19, 2008 at 4:13:42 am
It's gonna be tough sell, but CINEMACRAFT parent company has never been cheap. Cheap Cinemacraft product is CCE SP2, which retails just under 2K. I own it for years, and it earned every dollar back in a very short time. I could never go for Cinemacraft product which in 75K area. I understand that lot of FCP folks are "cheap", but there are guys like Walter Murch and Cohen bros. that use it for every film they cut, and they make major films.
I usually say to my clients: do you want "Lord of the Rings" and "Ratatouille" video quality, or you want it like anybody else?
Re: April 16 NAB Presentation by Connie Simmons on Oct 13, 2008 at 3:14:15 pm
Have any of you had good results with the new Cinema Craft Encoder MP? I have been trying to find the best result for an HD to SD downconvert compression to DVD.
I bought this software and am getting very mixed results, severe color shifting, black banding. I am still working on my settings to make sure that I am not doing something wrong, but I can't get the result I want yet.
CCE-MP can do HD to SD but not SD to HD or HD to HD by Mitch Sink on Apr 22, 2008 at 7:05:49 pm
Hi,
I just called and CCE-MP can compress HD to SD MPEG2. He thinks you could even bump the bit rate to a higher level than allowed by DVD to make an SD Blu Ray disc.
Re: Good news! - Mac Version Cinemacraft Encoder (Compressor Plugin) by Bill Hennessy on May 1, 2008 at 4:30:36 pm
Hi everybody
Bill Hennessy here from OMNI-CINEMACRAFT. I just wanted to jump in and clarrify our testing results on CCE-MP. First, our plugin for Compressor 3 was written specifically to run on an Intel Mac Pro. Our plugin utilizes processor power; so the more processors you have the faster your encodes. A second clarification; our engine is from our famous Xtream turnkey system. It's a different engine than our SP2 product. CCE-MP was built with quality in mind. Testing encoding times have resulted in 2-6 times real time speed. This is of course dependent upon the file input format of your source material.
Any other questions, I'll be more than happy to amswer.
Re: Good news! - Mac Version Cinemacraft Encoder (Compressor Plugin) by Michael Edwards on May 27, 2008 at 8:30:47 pm
Hello-
I'm wondering if this new encoder will remove the last remnants of frame judder from an HDV/ProRes to SD DVD conversion that Compressor's frame controls won't quite eliminate.
If it can do that, and speed up processing times, I'm on board immediately.
Re: Good news! - Mac Version Cinemacraft Encoder (Compressor Plugin) by adam forgione on Jul 11, 2008 at 6:33:32 pm
my thoughts exactly, i keep hearing how much better quality this is but it seems there is no demo or anything, do they expect us to spend $800 and hope its as good as we think? has anyone actually bought this and have been happy with the results. my concern is exactly about aliasing when down converting 1080 60i from HDV to SD, it looks horrible and unacceptable, if i know this software works ill spend the 800 but i cant do it with out proof.
