Tonight we posted version 3.3.5 of the MegaPEG Batch. The QT plug-in was not affected by this release which primarily included bug fixes for problems with Pause & Review introduced in 3.3.2.

At this time, we are aware of only one problem scenario for encoding with MegaPEG which involves quarter-pel motion (very slow moving footage). If you are experiencing problems with encoding this type of footage, contact technical support and they will help you find a workaround.

Here are some samples encoded with the latest 3.3 version of MegaPEG. The sources are noisy, handheld camera work, poor lighting. In short, your typical "indie" encoding job. Here's a 6 Mbit/s MPEG-2 version. And, demonstrating how MegaPEG's quality degrades gracefully as bitrate is reduced, here's a 1.5 Mbit/s MPEG-1 version.

Included are fixes for Apple 8-bit and 10-bit uncompressed YUV codecs and compatibility for AJA uncompressed. Also included are enhancements for studios encoding MPEG-2 for Blu-Ray.

Downloadable now using the name/password sent to you in your purchase email. Contact us if you have lost the email.

I'm not sure there really is a debate going on over automated vs interactive multipass video compression. But if there were, I'd point you in the direction of the most widely used interactive multipass compression system in the world. It's called "Save for Web" and is a feature of Adobe Photoshop. Any professional concerned about the quality of their work is going to be using "Save as Web" and interactively working with the compression amount and watching the effect it has on their final product. Irrespective of the huge volumes of research that have been published regarding the JPEG transform and the myriad ways to do it better.

Something to think about every time you open one of your digital Photos in iPhoto, adjust the contrast curve, and watch as the round trip through the automatic JPEG destroys your work.

Our download sites have just been updated, and in addition to a number of bug fixes, MegaPEG 3.3 features a native YCrCb image processing pipeline for source projects originating with YUV based source material. There is no question that under certain lighting conditions that this has a big impact on the image quality. We planned to release the update last week, but held it back so we could implement Velocity Engine optimized versions of the routines.

Additional improvements have been made for source material which originates in the RGB color space. While we retain our 'legacy' handing of Apple 1.8 Gamma RGB sources, we have added R'G'B' 2.2 Gamma (video and sRGB) as the default color space for processing RGB codecs.

Available immediately to all registered customers in "the usual" download location (use your existing username/login).

The Compressionist's Nightmare:
An Interview with WAMO's Jim Babinski