Here come the contest entries…

The 2008 Videomaker/Canon Short Video Contest is underway! The first entries are beginning to arrive and are being captured into our system. We can’t wait to see your entries, so don’t delay!

Over the course of this contest, we will be testing out TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress to conform all of the entries to a standard format for judging. The first look at this encoding software shows that it can import pretty much any file format that you can throw at it, and the resulting video output is very clean. It can’t directly handle ripped VOB files from a DVD, though, but it’s easy enough to import DVDs directly into the program for further processing. The program also makes cut-editing very easy to perform, the encoding is as quick as we could hope for on the system we’re running it on, and the batch encoding features work as advertised. It’s a very strong contender as far as encoding software goes.