Today’s question comes in from Andrew McKenna:
“I’m working an audio project that will ultimately go to MPEG-2. In the past I have delivered .wav files to an outside company who have then encoded MP2 (and charged well for it) before sending it to site for installing.
I run a B&W G3 for DP, Peak and Pro Tools. From my brief research there is a lot to know about the idiosyncracies of MP2 parameters, but it seems that doing audio encoding is a little more straight forward than video. If I would like to remove the middle step (and offer that service myself) whatwould I need to get set up?Is this something that can be accomplished in a software environment, or is hardware required as well?
InSync is a great column by the way.”
Thanks Andrew…here’s your answer.
Until recently, encoding MPEG-2 files did indeed require special hardware, but that has changed within the last year. A combination of two products from Terran – Cleaner 5 and MPEG Charger – allow PC or Mac users to encode all forms of MPEG-2 audio and/or video on their computers – taking minimum requirements into consideration, of course. But your Blue & White G3 should handle the job fine with this software. Depending on just how much you’ve been charged in the past for the service, and how often you need it done, this multimedia software cocktail could do just the trick for you…however, it’s not something to buy if you’d only use it a couple of times. That is, unless you can justify the expense.
But Cleaner is a very deep application and has a multitude of uses for those of us working with any type of media files. In terms of multimedia and internet content, it just about covers all the bases.