I'm still working on my big report of what happened in Vegas last week, but in the meantime, here's a demo encode of "What Happens in Vegas" from my MIX class, hosted on Silverlight Streaming.
If I do this right, below you should see the player embedded. Double-click to go full screen. The encode is "720p" - 1280x528 in this case as the source was 2.35:1.
You can also go to the embedding page directly here.
This was encoded with a beta of Expression Encoder 2.0, available for download. Settings I used are below.
And here's a screen shot of the EEv2 settings I used for the encode. A couple of things to note:
- With the new VC-1 Encoder SDK, we can now use Complexity 5 with the advanced codec settings (the old Format SDK overrode the Motion Match Method and Motion Search Level settings, making Complexity 4 higher quality when used with those methods).
- Overall, these are the ultimate high quality, slow encode options, and took nearly two hours to encode the clip on my laptop. In practice, simpler settings can look nearly as good with much faster encoding, but I wanted to see how par I could push VC-1 here.
- VBR is a big help here, for both video and audio, since the content's complexity is pretty variable. The VC-1 Encoder SDK does quite a bit better rate allocation in 2-pass VBR.
