CS4 Media Encoder-MPEG 2 Quality?
by ninetto makavejev
on
Jul 2, 2009 at 9:02:28 am
Well, I've run into my first disappointment with CS4.
Actually I might be one of the few who was quite pleased with most innovations of CS4, and had almost no bad surprises.
Now however, I have run into one: the quality of MPEG-2 encodes from SD PAL material. Granted, the material is rather noisy, and on the "up-side" I have found the media encoder in CS4 to be one of the fastest ones around... BUT:
it seems the black-values and contrast are quite bad when encoding at CBR, 7,5 Mbps. I have encoded the same material with Canopus ProCoder at the same settings and the results are MUCH better... i.e. Contast/Black values are spot-on and the noise/block-iness are absent.
I have also tried using a bit of Gausian Blur in the Adobe encoder but it doesn't improve anything.
I wonder if part of the problem is the fact that the original material is an Apple Quicktime PAL-DV file, and Adobe-PC has some wrong way of interpreting this format?
Any comments/tips would be much appreciated.
Re: CS4 Media Encoder-MPEG 2 Quality? by Vince Becquiot on Jul 2, 2009 at 3:29:48 pm
Did you you use the "use maximum quality" option in the little contextual menu on center right of the export window ?
I never understood why it's hidden there, but do forget about fast renders with this enabled, hope that helps...
On a side note, Procoder alone costs about as much as the entire Adobe suite (at least it did when we got the 2.0 version, so you would expect a bit of improvement :-)
