Every time I read or hear the name CinemaCraft, I feel like I'm back in 2000-2002. Let's step back about a decade (2010 now, so going back to 2000-2002 time frame).
Many years ago, MPEG encoders were pretty lousy -- even the professional ones. DVD technology was still relatively new, and the ability to create DVDs at home had not really happened yet. Most professional MPEG encoders were dedicated hardware (Matrox, Canopus, Sonic Solutions) or software from the likes of Panasonic, Sony, Terran (Cleaner), Ligos (LSX) and Custom Tech (CCE) -- with both types mostly being tied into an NLE or authoring setup like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro or Scenarist.
Of the available software encoders, the CinemaCraft Encoder was the best -- or to be more honest, the one that sucked the least. It was reasonably fast, held down blocky-ness pretty well, and could give decent multi-pass encoding. Most software encoders of that generation created blocky video, were single-pass (or did multi-pass terribly), and wanted more bitrate for even quality.
Things changed.
First came TMPGEnc Plus and Procoder.
Then MainConcept.
Then a crap load of others, some of them even being freeware.
MainConcept has more or less become the industry standard for MPEG encoding technology, as well as H.264 encoding. It was just that good. It's replaced a lot of hardware use, much to the aggravation of vendors that used to make or sell it. MainConcept knows it, too -- the price of their encoder has gone from $200 to $400 to $500 and higher, over the course of the past 6 years alone.
CinemaCraft was always an expensive program -- one that I think was unjustly/ridiculously priced -- at around $2,000 per copy. Hackers/crackers easily bypassed the serials and security on the program, and it was passed around quite a bit on the underground warez scene of its day -- Morpheus, Kazaa, Hotline, Limewire, etc. It's almost amusing to see freeware consumer "DVD copy" programs (like DVD-Rebuilder) coming with the added option of using the professional Procoder or CinemaCraft software as the encoding engine. Sure, some of us actually owned those programs (I've long had Procoder), but it's user base was obviously more widespread than the official license counts probably showed.
In the wake of all this freeware (QuEnc, HC Enc), consumer cheapware (TMPGEnc) and lower-priced newcomers (MainConcept), both Canopus and Custom Tech released stripped down and near-useless version of their apps -- Canopus Procoder Express and CinemaCraft Basic for under $100.
Sure, the programs worked well, but for the same price (at the time), you could get TMPGEnc and not be limited in bitrates, resolution, two-pass encoding, and other areas. Yes, TMPGEnc was slower, but CinemaCraft had it's own problems.
The biggest drawback to CinemaCraft has always been it's handling (and creation) of "mosquito noise" -- the noise that happens just before MPEG blocks start to break out. It's often referred to as "JPEG noise" because JPEG still images suffer the same types of artifacts when overcompressed or encoded/saved with poorer encoding methods.
The reason that neither Procoder Express and CinemaCraft Basic are no longer made is that -- and I'm giving an educated guess here -- is because there was no demand. The full version was what non-pros wanted, so those without ethics would just pirate it. Non-pros with ethics bought other software. Pros had already moved on to other apps during the time CCE was stagnant (compared to what others were doing). Given the era when this happened, around 2004-2005, home DVD creation was becoming more prevalent, and we saw a rise in those shoddy "all-in-one" apps, like iMovie. People did not have the patience to learn quality methods -- or worse, they were unaware of them. So MPEG encoders in general were not matching the upturn in DVD burners, blanks and other related software. Many companies -- MainConcept, especially -- offered their MPEG encoding engines via licensing to companies like Ulead/Corel, Adobe and Sonic Foundry (now Sony Digital), thereby adjusting to the times and its demand for all-in-one apps where MPEG encoding was a background operation.
This site has long (since 2002!) adhered to the principal of using the right tool for the right job -- as well as using a quality tool. When you want to encode an MPEG, you need a good MPEG encoder. About a decade ago, that was CinemaCraft. Now it's not, and probably never will be again.
What amazes me is that I have never met anybody at any studio, production company, indy film, etc., that has used CinemaCraft. The only CCE users I've ever come across have been using demo copies or illegally hacked copies.
According to the CCE site, Apple Compressor 3.x uses CCE. Well, most reviews I've seen for Compressor have not been all that favorable. I don't know where their revenue comes from, but I can't imagine it being their MPEG encoding software to end users. From my perspective, CCE was a product that started off strong, but slowly petered out in the past number of years, overtaken by competitors that did it better, did it faster, did it cheaper.
Yeah, TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 is a great encoder. Go ahead and use it, without feeling that you're missing out on something else.
And only $37 from
http://edge.affiliateshop.com/public...7389&BID=12418
Guide for using it at
http://www.digitalFAQ.com/guides/video/convert-tmpg.htm
I'd skip CCE in favor of pretty much anything else.
My personal preference is for MainConcept Reference -- a professional encoder for MPEG-2 and H.264 (and some other formats).
Get it for about $550 at
http://esd.element5.com/affiliate.ht...reference.html