Submitted by BrianBoyko on Tue, 18/08/2009 - 02:58

Hello - I'm considering switching over from Cineform NeoScene to VoltaicHD for my 24p pulldown needs. I have two questions:

1) The AVI format that Voltaic uses - will that introduce additional compression artifacting? What bitrate is it at? Can I choose which type of codec to use with my AVI file, or adjust the bitrate?

2) Will you be supporting other codecs - for example, Lagarith - in the future, for those of us looking for lossless compression?

In short, I just want to make sure before I recommend Voltaic that the product doesn't "recompress" the already compressed footage from AVCHD cameras.

Hi Brian, Voltaic starts by

Submitted by craig on Thu, 20/08/2009 - 10:04.

Hi Brian,

Voltaic starts by decoding the original H.264 video data in the AVCHD file into raw YUV frame data. It then needs to compress this again to get manageable file sizes.

For our WMV output we convert into the VC1 codec, for AVI we currently use MS MPEG4 V2 at one of three selectable bit rates 12Mb/s, 24Mb/s and 48Mb/s. We have found that outside WMV, MS MPEG4 V2 is the best option for importing into many of the available video editing packages.

At present we don't allow you to select the final codec that ends up in the avi file, but we're always willing to look at adding new features. We would definitely be keen to convert to something like Lagarith (or others) if there is demand for it.

Please let us know what features you'd like and we'll see what we can do.