Maximizing ProCoder 3 Performance
While upgrading the system is usually the best way to increase ProCoder 3’s performance, there are a few optimizations that you can do to increase ProCoder 3’s speed without hardware upgrades.
Optimize drive speed
Defragmenting the source and target hard drive can significantly increase read and write speeds.
Use separate source and target drives
Accessing source files and writing target files on separate physical disks will reduce seek data access times which will improve ProCoder 3’s performance.
Troubleshooting
This section illustrates some common video encoding problems and how you can fix or avoid them.
Video is blocky or appears to break up
The video image appears to break up into different moving blocks. Parts of previous video may appear in different locations. Notice in the example that elements of the correct video seem to be mixed with the older video. After some time, the image may recompose itself, producing a correct image
Result Original Image
Possible Causes:
DVD media reading problem – If you are seeing this type of problem after authoring a DVD and playing it back on a set-top DVD player, it could simply be a difficulty reading the DVD-recordable media. Try the same disc in a computer-based DVD player. If it plays in the computer without problems, try a different set-top player or a different brand or type of DVD-recordable disc. Many set-top players cannot reliably play all DVD-recordable discs.
Use of seek or trick-play in the player – If you were playing the file and playback was okay until you used the player’s fast-forward, rewind or scrubber to reposition the playback location, then it’s probably not a problem at all. Depending on the format and player, the video may take until the next keyframe to start displaying properly. Try letting the file play through from start to end without interrupting it to verify. If the video displays correctly in a straight-through playback, then the output file is fine.
Video bitrate too low or not enough keyframes – If the break-up only appears after scene changes, then the video bitrate is too low to handle the large change in the video. Increase the video bitrate to allow faster recomposition. Alternatively, if the target format supports keyframing, decrease the keyframe interval, thus increasing the number of keyframes. Keyframes provide a full video frame so large changes can be tracked and better compensated for.
Video bitrate too high – When using a hardware decoder, such as for MPEG playback, in some cases a video bitrate that is too high can cause the to image break up. If the video bitrate is at or near the maximum setting, try reducing it a bit. If it plays on a software-based player but not on a hardware-based player, this may also be because the bitrate is too high.
Video appears fuzzy or blurry
The video appears fuzzy or blurry. When played zoomed, it appears blocky, almost like viewing something through a frosted glass window.
Result Original Image
Possible Causes:
DV playback not set to full quality – If the problem occurs only with Microsoft DV AVI files, the problem may be due to the Digital Video decode setting being set to Low. When set to Low, DV files are decoded in low resolution, regardless of what the resolution of the actual file is.
To fix this problem in Windows Media Player:
Open Windows Media Player, and look for the Options selection in the menu (usually under Tools).
Look for a setting called Digital Video that has a slider with Small at one end and Large at the other. In Windows Media Player 9, this is found by clicking the Advanced button in the Performance tab.
Set the slider to Large.
Close all open programs including Windows Media Player, then open the file for playback again. The file should now play in full resolution.
Video resolution too low – When stretched to the original size, a low-resolution image will appear blocky. If you want or need to view the image at the same size as the original, you should increase the video frame size. In order to preserve quality and avoid similar effects due to too low a bitrate, the bitrate should be increased when increasing the video resolution.
Video bitrate too low – Depending on the encoding format, a video bitrate that is too low can also produce blocky video as shown above. Increase the video bitrate to see if this is the case. If increasing the bitrate does not help, the video frame size needs to be increased.