Please check this latest Creative COW CompressHD Product Review by Craig Seeman:
Matrox CompressHD races to the H.264 finish line


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Well I've been testing this card for some time now. I've been in touch with their engineers. In fact I had a conference call with their entire development staff including a gentleman names Jean Lapierre the head of development for Mac.

They were very gracious and kind and even offered to take a look at my original settings and create a custom setting that would kick out the same specs as what I was encoding with Compressor only. They guaranteed it would at least match the video quality of Compressor alone, naturally much faster though.

Man I really wanted this to work, but the results speak for themselves. I have yet to see a video encoded on the CompresseHD card that can match my Compressor only settings. Anyone else way in on this? I really want to be wrong, but no one can seem to match my quality. I'll even send you an uncompressed clip and my original settings if you want to have a go at it?

Here are my results:

So I finally got to the bottom of this. Matrox has not yet developed their software to include the ability to recognize scene changes on it's own. Compressor currently has the ability to analyze the source footage and recognize scene changes and insert a Keyframe there. Pretty major issue if you ask me.

If all you're doing is testing a 2 min clip of the same basic footage then the car will probably do a great job. But if you're encoding a production of any kind with video cuts etc...you're going to run into problems as before.

I will give them credit for working very hard with me, however I'm kinda surprised it took them so long to figure out that this was what was missing in their software. It is my understanding that they are working to add this to one of their next software upgrade. I'm hoping to re-evaluate at that point.