Edward,
You never answered my e-mails once I presented my facts and comparisons. But I figured people deserve to know the truth, because no matter what large media corps your have among 3am Digital Studios customers, they obviously don't spend too much time testing quality of a codec. I think, for many just seeing "x264" in product's title, or to read impressive commercial texts, is a good enough reason to make up their mind.
I will comment each of your points:
1: If the quality of your codec in its best quality produces more artifacts than MainConcept, what's the point to mention your codec in its draft quality? Yes, it's true that speed-wise you will be equal to MC, but quality-wise - it will be a mess (not even close to "approximately the same quality", as you say). And, as you know, I have video clips to prove that: Download - Inbox Files. The 2nd and the 3rd file, which took same time to encode, compared against each other on Premiere's timeline with 100% magnification show the obvious difference between the two codecs. Also this test reveals another problem that Premiere decodes your files starting only from third frame, which makes them appear two frames short and desynced. So, to make a comparison, x264 PRO clip has to be dragged 2 frames to the right.
2: I don't have clarity about the colorspace thing to comment on that, but I just noticed that for some reason the encodes I made with your codec found under download link in the above paragraph do not have this shifted colors problem, while encodes I made of the full clip, had it. I was encoding from the same CineForm source, so I'm puzzled about why one encode ended up in true colors, while other - in shifted. But I'm not gonna investigate that since the my main disappointment about x264 PRO consists of artifacts and blurriness. It's nice to know, though, that you can somehow avoid shift of colors.
3: This depends on how you encode. It's a known fact that the best quality squeezable out of any AVC codec comes from 2-pass encoding. If, say, you have bunch of effects applied in your project that slow it down (for example, Neat Video for noise reduction, which will drastically reduce a speed of render), 2-pass will mean rendering that "heavy" project twice. So, it may actually be that rendering it in 1 pass to a near lossless codec, such as CineForm or DNxHD, and then encoding this "light" file in 2 passes would be faster than waiting for the "heavy" 2nd pass to finish. Plus, if something turns out to be incorrect in the output file, let's say a glitch in the middle of your project, you don't have to reencode the whole thing to fix that small part. So, to me encoding to CineForm or DNxHD and then to H.264 is the way to go.
But, if we do talk about direct encoding to H.264 via plugin, then certainly MainConcept, built into Adobe's Media Encoder and Premiere, is the way to go, proven by my tests. If someone insists on the best possible quality, then freeware MediaCoder (not to be confused with Media Encoder) with latest x264 included is the way to go. Either you encode into CineForm and then drop these files to MediaCoder, or you can can actually make a direct connection between Adobe (Premiere or Media Encoder) and MediaCoder via the freeware DebugMode FrameServer plugin. It requires a bit of technical knowledge, but really not much. Once DebugMode FrameServer is installed, you can choose it from the codecs list. Exporting to it creates an empty file, which you can drop to MediaCoder and finish exporting to the latest x264. This will produce maximum quality possible up to a bitrate of 16 mbps, which is a limitation of MediaCoder's free version. In case someone wants to try it, I'll give a quick tip about MediaCoder's settings:
- Video tab: any bitrate you want up to 16000, Rate Mode - 2-pass, Preset - Slow
- Audio tab: Format - LC-AAC, Rate Mode - CBR, Bitrate/Quality - 256 (you can go with Target Quality 50, but in my experience CBR bitrate is less subject to desync, when played back on various devices or re-compressed in YouTube)
- Container tab: Container - MP4
- Picture tab: press the Resize button, change Scale algorithm to Lanczos, close that window, and if you need to downscale or upscale your video, put a tick next Resize button and choose your size.
4: Sorry, didn't get that one. 😃
My main question is: tell me, 3am Digital Studios, if your codec is an implementation of original x264, how come the quality of it differs so noticeably? I can understand the speed problem could be due to mentioned Media Encoder serving up frames very slowly, but what about the compression? I mean just look at that: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/94303. Roll your mouse over each of these 10 stills, compare the encodes I made under download link above and tell me, how can anyone possibly make a grand quality encode with x264 PRO, when even at 12 Mbps we get this kind of artifacts?
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