Normally, we don't spend a lot of time obsessing about what other encoder manufacturers are doing. We have a product roadmap and we're sticking with it. I'd say when we first released our technical encoding and analysis tools afew eyebrows were raised - but it is evident that as the sophistication of the average pro DVD author grows, our tools become increasingly attractive.

I recently visited the website of Sonic Solutions, who are most certainly one of the leaders in DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD authoring technology. They gained initial leadership in this market by becoming the US distributor for Scenarist, which was the first DVD authoring tool (ever - AFAIK). Scenarist was developed by a Japanese company DAIKEN. Much in the way that Apple gained a foothold by acquiring Spruce Technologies.

Sonic has recently introduced some semi-automated yet basic (IMO, compared to MPressionist HDTV) picture quality analysis tools as part of their compression package. Some might say they are copying us, which would make us one of the leaders in this market.

Ross was an After Effects wizard who contacted us because one of his projects was going to DVD and he had been asked (much to his horror) to do the encoding and disc authoring. To complicate matters, an PAL -> NTSC conversion was needed. Our technical support worked with a section of his sample footage, which was an excerpt from a rock concert shot on PAL. He took the template settings we created an encoded some sample footage for the project's director. She was impressed with the quality. He used our PAL to NTSC conversion which kept the fields intact as it converted the 25i footage to 29.97i.

Here's the test we did:
digigami.in-long-beach-ca.com/megapeg/ross/RossMarTests/

Mars Studios
www.marstudios.com

Tonight we posted version 3.3.5 of the MegaPEG Batch. The QT plug-in was not affected by this release which primarily included bug fixes for problems with Pause & Review introduced in 3.3.2.

At this time, we are aware of only one problem scenario for encoding with MegaPEG which involves quarter-pel motion (very slow moving footage). If you are experiencing problems with encoding this type of footage, contact technical support and they will help you find a workaround.

Here are some samples encoded with the latest 3.3 version of MegaPEG. The sources are noisy, handheld camera work, poor lighting. In short, your typical "indie" encoding job. Here's a 6 Mbit/s MPEG-2 version. And, demonstrating how MegaPEG's quality degrades gracefully as bitrate is reduced, here's a 1.5 Mbit/s MPEG-1 version.

Included are fixes for Apple 8-bit and 10-bit uncompressed YUV codecs and compatibility for AJA uncompressed. Also included are enhancements for studios encoding MPEG-2 for Blu-Ray.

Downloadable now using the name/password sent to you in your purchase email. Contact us if you have lost the email.

I'm not sure there really is a debate going on over automated vs interactive multipass video compression. But if there were, I'd point you in the direction of the most widely used interactive multipass compression system in the world. It's called "Save for Web" and is a feature of Adobe Photoshop. Any professional concerned about the quality of their work is going to be using "Save as Web" and interactively working with the compression amount and watching the effect it has on their final product. Irrespective of the huge volumes of research that have been published regarding the JPEG transform and the myriad ways to do it better.

Something to think about every time you open one of your digital Photos in iPhoto, adjust the contrast curve, and watch as the round trip through the automatic JPEG destroys your work.

This is an official notice that the first release of MegaPEG Universal binaries will be a no-charge upgrade to existing MegaPEG customers.

Also, we are currently giving away a free copy of MPressionist Pro HD to any customer who purchases the full version of MegaPEG HDTV. All you need to do is send an email to technical support after purchasing MegaPEG HDTV.

Our download sites have just been updated, and in addition to a number of bug fixes, MegaPEG 3.3 features a native YCrCb image processing pipeline for source projects originating with YUV based source material. There is no question that under certain lighting conditions that this has a big impact on the image quality. We planned to release the update last week, but held it back so we could implement Velocity Engine optimized versions of the routines.

Additional improvements have been made for source material which originates in the RGB color space. While we retain our 'legacy' handing of Apple 1.8 Gamma RGB sources, we have added R'G'B' 2.2 Gamma (video and sRGB) as the default color space for processing RGB codecs.

Available immediately to all registered customers in "the usual" download location (use your existing username/login).

The Compressionist's Nightmare:
An Interview with WAMO's Jim Babinski

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced that it will release the James Bond Ultimate Edition DVD Collection on July 17th, offering sharper sound and images for all 20 James Bond movies which were remastered by DTS Digital Images using an installation of 600 Power Mac G5 systems. "

Source: MacNN

Apple has recently updated QuickTime to version 7.1.1. Based on our testing, if you're running Tiger 10.4.x, it is recommended that you run QuickTime 7.1.1 with Digigami products. QuickTime plug-in versions of MegaPEG require 7.1.1 on Tiger.

On Panther, 10.3.9 and QuickTime 6.5.1 is the recommended configuration.

2006.12.14 - Version 3.3.3 and higher of the MegaPEG QT plug-in include fixes for the multiplexing bug which prevented the batch creation of muxed System and Program streams.

Our QuickTime plug-ins now include a multi-threaded Batch processing tool which can run many conversion jobs in parallel. Called MoviesForMyG5, the program runs on Panther 10.3, Tiger 10.4 and is compatible with MacIntel. The application is included in the standard download package for all Digigami "QuickTime" plug-ins.

Known Bugs:

• FIXED: Muxed Output Not Working, DVD streams OK
• Cancel icon not present for "Cancel One" Job
• FIXED: Incompatible with Fast User Switching

Sony Announce UMD Composer For UMD Video Creation

Sony Computer Entertainnment Japan have announced some new UMD video authoring software called UMD composer. It allows developers to create UMD discs images and will set you back a cool 215,000 yen, or less dauntingly approximately $2000 USD!

At the demonstration, Sony played a H.264 video with a resolution of 720 x 480 that was created with Stream Composer. Sony also stated that most UMD-Video titles currently on the market are recorded in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC with a resolution of 720 x 480.

Naturally, I'm going to incur the wrath of the H.264 proponents here, but I had previously demuxed some UMD H.264 titles verified they are encoded at 720x480. But I have to say, at the 720x480 resolution, H.264-type artifacts (which roughly amount to an edge-aware smoothing filter) are evident. I'm sure the folks at Doom9.org would simply say that Sony's H.264 encoder is lackluster.

Source: Maxconsole.net: Sony Announce UMD Composer For UMD Video Creation

Surfing the web tonight, I encountered a record label/music site with some RealAudio content. I thought it would be good to give RealPlayer 10 (Universal) a try on our HD MPEG-1 VBR 720p (Least Likely PSA). Sure enough, it plays great. In fact, the quality is excellent, suggesting Real has done some first-class work on it's MPEG-1/MPEG-2 decoder.

So to summarize the playback software capable of delivering streaming 720p HD content using MPEG-1 VBR:

• Real Player 10 Mac
• Real Player 10 PC
• QuickTime Mac
• QuickTime Windows
• Windows Media Player
• VideoLAN for just about every Linux

Universal HD delivery to Mac and PC desktops.

This is an interesting page that came up in a tangential google search:
http://wiki.ffii.org/Ep12345678En

If you're attempting to encode Photo-pans or other extremely slow moving footage in MegaPEG Pro, we have discovered a bug in the product. The workaround is to use "Fast & Good" on the Speed vs. Quality slider. This setting is also performing very well for 1920x1080 frame sizes. I am getting about 11:1 encoding time for 1080p 24fps using this setting and the results look identical to the source material. As always, for specific encoding questions, please contact us.

Our new sales and technical support phone number (818) 441-2743.

Promoscape, a customer of ours (BrandB upgrade) contacted tech support after their initial results with MegaPEG HDTV did not meet their expectations. On the right you see the bitrate graphs of their first try with MegaPEG vs. BrandB. They took the standard PAL DVD 7.5 Mbits/s template and increased the bitrate to 8.6 Mbits/s and ran their tests.

As is customary for our technical support, I first had the customer upload the two respective MPEG-2 files to our FTP server. At that point, I performed a quick analysis of the two files using MPressionist Pro HD, and based on my analysis, noticed that BrandB was using a 9.8 Mbits/s peak bitrate, and so I requested the customer upload the source clip so we could design a custom template for them.

This chart shows the difference using our technical-support designed encoding parameters. The resulting file meets or exceeds the quality of the BrandB encoded file, but at 1/3 of the average bitrate. Yes, the BrandB file came out to 14 MB and the final MegaPEG file is 5.5 MB. Additionally, the MegaPEG encoded file spends far less time up in the 9.8 Mbits/s region. I have my doubts that the BrandB file complies with the DVD specification. Typically, professionally encoded DVDs have single peaks up to/over 9.8 Mbits/s, but in this case we find the first 5 GOPs all at the 9.8 Mbits/s maximum bitrate. To my way of thinking, this is exactly the advantage that MegaPEG's operator-assisted multi-pass encoding gives you. Instead of burning up 2/3 of your bit budget on 'automatic' bitrate allocation, you can eliminate wasted bits, which gives you more bits for difficult passages and/or more room on your disc for supplementary materials.

The resulting files are located here:
http://digigami.in-long-beach-ca.com/megapeg/brandb-vs-megapeg-DVD/

This project was encoded with our 3.2 Beta, which is available to all existing 'Batch' customers in the usual download location.