Re: Fw: new pc finally arrived and have to make decisions-help

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from J R FOX  on Sun, 18 Dec 2005
18:06:00 -0800 (PST)

You and Manuel are getting way off topic, BUT... I've done a ton of
frameserving with VirtualDub and Avisynth, synched audio with BeSweet and
NanDub, captured with Adobe Premiere and other programs, encoded with CCE and
TMPGenc, played with Spruce Maestro and Scenarist, etc etc. I've had my share
of disappointments and met a lot of god-awful video programs too, including
most of the mid-range [$50-200] commercial programs (all of which are too
simpleminded -- single-pass, fixed bit rate -- if you want a great result, you
need to do multipass VBR [re]encoding with an expensive encoder like CCE
[$2500], or go for professional results with Scenarist encoder [$37000], or
else you need enormous patience [TMPGenc takes forever] -- most of the pop
products [Vegas, Ulead, etc] are suitable for home movies only, or scenes shot
with your cell phone camera -- high-definition video is a different planet
entirely). The best video products are either free hacker tools (like IfoEdit,
DVDDecrypter, VDub) or very costly. To optimize this stuff under any OS, you
need to kill services and boost the priority of these programs waaay above
normal (do you know how to do that? it's important). Moreover, audio sync is
a big problem with any OS, especially when you're converting between PAL and
NTSC (most of what I do) -- it needs to be actively managed. I never
attributed any bad results to Win2K; I think bad results are just par for the
course due to the phenomenal "non-sensible" complexity of the process and the
ignorance of most users -- but I've also had some great results, within the
limits of digitized content. Video is tricky tricky. Personally, I think it
should all go back to analog, which is the way we actually see and hear.
Compare the audio of a DVD and a Laserdisc, and there's no comparison -- Laser
is much more natural-sounding, much more expansive, because there's simply more
information being conveyed, no compression, and no A-D D-A conversion.

I could be getting work done...

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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