Product Reviews

One of the reasons for ProCoder's success is ease of use. Whereas Cleaner's interface has become more complicated with every release, ProCoder 2 continues to use the same simple three-stage process: you choose your source media, define your encoding settings and destination, then hit Convert. However, existing ProCoder users should be aware that despite the interface looking the same, the underlying file format has changed so you can't load your old projects.

The biggest enhancement with this version is the new Watch folder system. This allows you to create a dedicated encoding workstation, with shared folders you simply drop files into for automatic encoding. You can't define multiple encoding targets in a single Watch folder profile, but must instead create a new entry for each type of encode.

ProCoder

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now comes with a selection of presets for the huge range of supported target types. As well as MPEG-1 and 2, QuickTime, Windows Media and Real, DivX is also now embedded. QuickTime's MPEG-4 implementation is also supported.

ProCoder 2 can also transcode between MPEG, Windows Media or DivX HD and any SD format, so you could bump down to 16:9 DV for editing, or convert HD edited in MPEG-2 to WMVHD for online distribution.

There are considerable performance enhancements too. We ran tests against ProCoder 1.5, converting a DV file to MPEG-2 at a 6Mb/sec constant bit rate on a dual 3.06GHz Xeon workstation. While 1.5 took 320 seconds, version 2 took just 197 seconds. We also compared ProCoder 2 to Discreet Cleaner XL. Encoding the same file to a 6Mb/sec variable bit-rate MPEG-2 profile took 251 seconds with ProCoder 2, and 231 seconds with Cleaner. Where ProCoder really dominates, however, is in its multithreading support. When we added a simultaneous QuickTime encode on the top, Cleaner took 336 seconds, whereas ProCoder 2 took just 308.

Alongside the already excellent capabilities of version 1 - one of the best NTSC-PAL transcoders around, command-line activation and encoding droplets - ProCoder 2's features cement its status. Existing users will want to upgrade for the MPEG-2 encoding performance boost alone, but there's plenty more to entice new users and old hands alike.