FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Digigami Ships MPressionist Pro HD 3.0: Statistical and Comparative Picture Quality Analysis for standard and HD-DVD.

Ensures Independently Produced DVD Picture Quality is Flawless

"Prior to the advent of MPressionist, DVD picture quality was a crapshoot." said Digigami CTO, 清岡家元. "I maintain a collection of commercial DVDs available at retail outlets such as Tower Records that include embarrassing glitches in picture quality. Most DVD compression tools focus the activities of the DVD author around squeezing the video down to a particular file size, or average bitrate. Unfortunately, placing bitrate demands on arbitrary kinds of video footage can result in embarassing compression artifacts, and without a tool like MPressionist Pro, finding these compression artifacts is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Our latest version of MPressionist makes finding compression artifacts even easier. A new 'picture difference' or 'delta' feature, allows the DVD author to 'watch' the compressed movie as per-pixel differences from the original source material. Rather than scrutinizing frames, one can simply watch the analysis display watching for 'bright spots' which indicate frames which have been greatly altered during the MPEG compression. Conversely, long sequences of frame differences which render as 'black' indicate that the compressed movie is basically identical to the original - which is what most DVD authors are wanting to find out: 'How has the video compression changed the quality of my creative work?'."

Metering and Monitoring Tools Not Available Elsewhere

"MPressionist Pro HD also includes metering and monitoring tools useful for finding common technical problems inherent in DVD authoring and production. A true 'interlaced' playback mode, which can be combined with slow motion playback, makes it very easy to visually determine whether or not the field dominance of the compressed MPEG movie accurately reflects the field ordering in the source movie. If the fields are reversed, the slow-mo 'interlaced' playback will show moving objects as jumping forward and backward, instead of moving with a smooth, uniform quality. As well, we've introduced a new graph which maps out I-frame (chapter point and cutscene) breaks." continued Kiyooka, "We've also improved the speed of the product and expanded upon the bitrate and compression graphs unveiled in version 1.0 - you can now have multiple compressed movies open, and a separate 'in-depth' detailed view of local bitrate and compression (Q) peaks available for quickly locating hotspots where artifacts may be found."

Works with All Encoders and Applications: Apple Compressor, Hardware Encoders and PC Solutions.

"Although we design MPressionist to work with MegaPEG (Digigami's own compression software)," continued Digigami CTO, 清岡家元, "since MPressionist conforms to the ISO/IEC 13818 and 11172 MPEG standards, the software works with all kinds of MPEG encoders and applications of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video. We have customers using MPressionist with hardware encoders and Apple Compressor. As well, since the new HD product de-multiplexes MPEG-2 Program and Transport Streams, analysis of elsewhere-produced content is straightforward; you can capture an on-the-air ATSC HDTV broadcast of the 'Tonight Show', for instance, and bring it up under MPressionist for analysis. The product also works with commercially produced (unencrypted) DVD discs (revealing the secrets of Hollywood) and Prosumer HDV camcorder footage. Increasingly, as HDV-based MPEG-2 penetrates the independent production community, the proper tools will be needed for picture quality and diagnostic analysis."

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