Pixelrrific

Microsoft Expression Encoder is the latest Windows Media Video encoder from Microsoft.  Some will scoff and say, why don’t you just use Quicktime??”  Well, most business clients use some version of Windows.  Installing new software on a corporate machine is often not an option due to security restrictions.  Besides, Windows Media 11 offers a very high quality video codec that is also very space efficient.  If your NLE does not output in Windows Media format, or does so poorly, this is a great free solution.

Those of us who use Sony Vegas Pro, and have had to deliver Windows Media Video files share a common frustration.  Even as of version 9C, encoding of Windows Media (wmv) files are painfully slow to say the least.  Depending on the output resolution, you can expect around 4X to 6X render times.  Very annoying, because Vegas is blazing fast when rendering Mpeg2 files.  One reason is because all processor cores are utilized.  WMV rendering utilizes only a single processor core.

Recently, I was faced with a job that would require delivering over eight hours of video as WMV files.  One final render started late afternoon was still running the following morning, and not even half way through!  Rendering each hour of video would take around four to six hours each.  Instead, I chose to output as HD 720P mpeg2 files, and this did so faster than realtime.  About .8X or so.  The segments were imported into Expression Encoder, and the jobs were encoding at faster than realtime!  Even with the added step, render times were under 2X using a quad core Intel based machine!