Encoding

CANOPUS EDIUS 4 REVIEW

by Paul Wags www.hdvunderwater.com

Encoding-Output

To send your completed DV edit back to your camera via Firewire is a snap and you can even leave your DV camera hooked up so as you edit is appears in realtime on you camera. That means you can just play the timeline out and hit record on you DV camera as it plays out to it via firewire. The other easy way to get it back to your DV camera is to click on Print to Tape and it feeds it out to the DV camera via firewire.

Sending Back To The DV Camera is Easy

If you want to encode to another format, then you click on Print To File and a title window will appear. You can then pick from a number of options or even Canopus Procoder Express to encode the file. Here you will also find the Speed Encoder for HDV option that you would use if you were encoding out HDV m2t files. You can also encode out m2t HDV files using the Speed Encoder. You get the same quality visually but with a faster encode to a m2t file.

The test I did was on 1 min of HDV footage from the timeline and it took 4.30 min's to encode out the one minute, compared to 5.30 minutes using Procoder Express. That is quite a bit of time you save if you were encoding out many minutes of HDV (m2t) files. With a multi-core CPU, Speed Encoder will be much faster due to it's multi-core optimisation.

Encoding out a DV file from a DV 5 minute long timeline took only a few minutes, faster than realtime and that's the same if you are going to the Canopus HQ codec or the Canopus Lossless AVI.

I did find the the WMV files I encoded out with Procoder Express were better quality than the Windows Media Video Option, but they took twice as long to render out. About the only thing I had problems with was encoding out QT H.264 from the timeline, the QT error message came up, but this is minor and I get the same problem with Premiere Pro. It could encode out other QT no problems.

The PAL and NTSC DVD files I encoded out looked great, although the NTSC ones weren't as sharp although if you were just producing tour DVD's in both formats to sell to day customers you could use them no problems. I even encoded out m2t 60i files and then sent them back to my PAL 50i Sony HDV (FX1 & A1) cameras, again no problems. The HDV PAL 1440/1080/50i cameras just kicked into 60i mode and took the feed. Although the 60i files did not look as good as the 50i ones, they were certainly not un usable.

Here are two wmv files, one made from a PAL 50i m2t and the other a NTSC 60i m2t file and you can even download the two m2t files I made straight from the 50i timeline.
http://www.hdvunderwater.com/videoclips/pal.wmv (4 megs)
http://www.hdvunderwater.com/videoclips/ntsc.wmv (4 megs)
HDV 50i PAL m2t file http://www.hdvunderwater.com/videoclips/NTSCshark.m2t (45 megs)
HDV 60i NTSC m2t file http://www.hdvunderwater.com/videoclips/PALshark.m2t (45 megs)

So just how good is the Canopus HQ with realtime colour corection compared to Premiere Pro 1.5 & Aspect HD? Well why don't you download the following underwater m2t clips and see for yourselves? 22 megs each in size.

Export Using Procoder Express, It Has Many Options That All Can Be Fine Tuned.

Once you have encoded out your m2t files, you can use TS Writer to preview your m2t files and send the clips back to your HDV camera.

MPEG TS Writer