Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve(MS)
Concerning AVI to MPG, TMPGenc 2.5, around 40 dollars and the next step up is a 500 dollar encoder?
That appears to be a big chasm, wonder why no one has tried to fill the void? |
Not really. Most professional grade software relies on ground-up research and development (R&D), and that carries high costs.
Once upon a time, programmers were paid "too much", but various economic and IT industry factors have wiped that out, as far as I know. They get normal salaries like everybody else. There is still some issues with "corporate profits" of course, but I don't know that somebody as small as
MainConcept or
Adobe is as vulgar with executive pay as large companies like Exxon, Microsoft or Sony. These days, I think a lot of it does actually go towards the research and development (paying teams of programmers).
A lot of other software is one-man/few-man copycats, often reverse engineering what was done, then trying to "do it cheaper". In the case of time-oriented tasks, like video encoding, they also promise to "do it faster". The compromise always comes at quality. You see this a lot with cheap and crappy $30-50 Chinese software, using all sorts of random names you've never heard of -- and in a few years, they'll disappear again.
TMPGEnc Plus is an anomaly, more than anything else. It's an extension of the Tsunami MPEG Encoder, an MPEG-1 encoding program shareware/freeware from 2000. At one point in time, TMPGEnc Plus was quite a bit more than $37. I don't remember the price anymore. It may have been as high as $99. I would wager that it's only still available due to demand. It's not often that you see a program sell, almost unchanged, for 8 years straight. It's just that good.
Canopus and CinemaCraft both released consumer versions of their encoders several years ago for under $100 -- Canopus Procoder Express and CinemaCraft Basic. But I guess both flopped in the market, as these only last for one version. Or at least, I only remember one version, for about a year, around 2005 or so. The programs were too limited for most needs (720x480 only, DVD MPEG-2 only, etc), for the audience that likely would have paid $100. And the tool was too limited for the dumb consumer that expects one program to edit, encode, burn a DVD and make them breakfast with two mouse clicks, with a $50 budget. Even something as simple as the ability to encoder 352x480 for MPEG-2 would have pleased many users. But no, that required the "full version" for about $600 to Procoder, or $2000 to CCE. Instead of pleasing those users, and selling them a sub-$100 program, many of them simply resorted to piracy or defected to mid-priced program like
MainConcept. Canopus and CCE made $0 from that boneheaded move.
Earlier on, MainConcept was in the $150-250 range, from the pre-Reference era (MC versions 1.3 to 1.5). The price has gone up quite a bit in the past 6 years, since it was released. When it moved to the Reference system, cost about doubled for the MPEG-2 encoder. This may be due to the inclusion of HD resolution encoding options.
I often think
Adobe learned from the mistakes of the MPEG encoders, when it created the "Elements" series of Premiere editors. It provides a basic editor, MainConcept-based encoder and authoring workflow in a simple sub-$100 program. It's mostly good for a DV workflow, however, and controls can be limited for more advanced users. But still not as bad as the Procoder/CCE consumer encoder snafu.