Depth of Options
When I started testing this program my first thought was, “Wow, I didn’t realize there were this many ways of playing digital video!” I counted twenty different output mediums, and a lot of these have options for varying quality. For example, you can choose to output video for storage on a thumb-drive, and then select the memory size of the drive. You can also choose to output to Flash, and choose the bandwidth of your target audience’s internet connection.
The same video was compressed to a file size of 12MB and then zoomed in to show the differences. Notice how VideoWrap produced a sharper picture with smoother edges.
Other options include output for playback on various video game systems, and output designed for archiving to CD, DVD, hard drive, or thumb drive. There are also the ubiquitous ultra-small file size compression settings for Youtube uploads and playback on cell phones, iPods, and Blackberries. Admittedly, when it comes to watching movies I just do not get how anybody could stand to watch video that is the size of a postage stamp. I do like Youtube, because, while the quality is often bad, I do like being able to e-mail videos to my friends without clogging up their Inboxes. But “the kids” these days don’t seem to have a problem watching ultra-small, ultra-low-quality videos on portable devices, so if that’s your target market, then VideoWrap has you covered in spades.
One more cool feature of VideoWrap that is more fun than useful is that once it’s finished encoding, it tells you by what percentage it reduced the size of your original file. Compression algorithms are so amazing these days that almost all of the percentages were above 95% for conversion from DV-AVI files.
When your video has finished encoding, VideoWrap tells you the percentage by which it was able to reduce the file size..
Performance
Performance varies with this software, as with any encoding software, based on the complexity of the encoding mechanism. For example, using VideoWrap to encode a trailer for Youtube resulted in a conversion faster than real-time. However, encoding the same trailer to HD for playback on a PS3 resulted in conversion times that were about 9X as long as the running time of the video. This is one of those areas where it is really going to help to have a faster processor, as encoding is a very processor-intensive job.
As far as the video output created by VideoWrap, results were mostly positive. Youtube output was a definite high-point. I compared VideoWrap’s encoding of the trailer for my film, Livelihood, with Adobe’s Media Encoder. Although the files sizes were similar, when they were both loaded to Youtube, VideoWrap’s version was much better, with reduced motion artifacts and blockiness. Youtube video is never going to look great, but it’s comforting to know that when you use VideoWrap it’s as good as it’s going to get.
Creating 90-second video for a thumb drive was also an eye-opener. The original DV-AVI file was 315MB, and VideoWrap was able to get it down to 12.8MB while retaining an astounding amount of quality. The only major issues were some blocky frame blends at a few edit points. I would be very comfortable buying up a bunch of cheap thumb drives, putting my demo reel on them, and handing them to people as a promotional tool. However, while the quality was amazing, one big problem with this thumb drive export was that I used the “10MB drive” setting, and it spit out a 12.8MB file. So that’s probably a bug that needs to be worked out.
Encoding with the “Archive to DVD Data Disk” setting also provided amazing results. The original AVI was 1.46GB, and the resultant 101MB mpeg4 file had no loss in quality that I could see. This is incredible, and could be an excellent way for places that have a high-volume of video work to archive their old jobs.
