Review: Rhozet Carbon Coder

Carbon Coder also produced fewer dropped frames than Squeeze, and produced sharp and clear Windows Media video with bright, vibrant colors. The video was relatively free of deinterlacing jaggies and other artifacts, and Carbon Coder avoided the severe problems that ProCoder exhibited with some animated clips. In short, Carbon Coder does a great job with Windows Media files.

To assess QuickTime quality, I compared the file produced by Carbon Coder to a file encoded by QuickTime Pro. Quality was virtually identical, though QuickTime Pro produced slightly more vibrant colors, especially in clips shot against black backgrounds.

I compared the Flash clips to those encoded with Flix Pro, again noticing that Carbon Coder's clips were a touch faded, but otherwise identical to Flix Pro's through low and high motion clips. With Real, I compared quality against clips encoded by RealProducer, and again noticed a slight fading.

Overall, compression quality across the board either matched or exceeded the best encoder for each format that I had tested previously. When first using Carbon Coder, look out for fading, and either boost saturation in your editor or deploy Carbon Coder’s Black/White Correction filter to resolve the problem.

Performance
As much as I liked the feature set and quality produced by Carbon Coder, it was the performance that really grabbed me. I happened to be reviewing the dual-socket, quad-core HP xw8400 workstation for another magazine, and very few of the programs that I tested, including Sorenson Squeeze, were able to leverage the multiple processors in the system. Figure 3 shows what I mean.

Figure 3 (below). Carbon Coder is one of the most efficient multi-threaded programs I’ve ever seen, utilizing at or near 100% in most encoding operations.

In Figure 3, you see Carbon Coder’s Queue Manager, encoding the jobs that made up my test routine. Within the Queue Manager, you get to choose how many files are encoded simultaneously. I choose to five, and Carbon Coder responded by maxing out the utilization of all eight processors as you can see in the Windows Task Manager graphs shown in the Figure. While Carbon Coder often utilized up to 100% of all eight processors, Squeeze was in the 27% range. As a result, Carbon Coder encoded the test suite in 3:38 (min:sec) compared to 8:48 for Sorenson Squeeze.

At $4,995, Carbon Coder isn’t for small shops or casual users. However, if your facility has outgrown the functionality that even three or four installations of Sorenson Squeeze can provide, or needs features or format support not provided in Squeeze, Carbon Coder should definitely be on your short list.