As far as my experiments go, I've tested out the Panasonic codec, the Sony 2.23, the MS codec and the internal one in Vegas. Made some very interesting discoveries. Getting a good picture seems to be a matter of matching up the codec with proper encoding parameters.
Codecs come in 2 flavors - squished and non-squished (I'm trying to avoid the word compressed). In TV land we need to finish with something squished because TVs can't use the full range of colors like a PC. If not, it looks over-saturated with burned out whites and loss of detail in the black. So this exercise is mostly about where and how many times the squishing occurs.
4 Codecs I testedPanasonic and Microsoft - both output 0-255, RGB24
- non-squishedSony and Vegas internal (MC?) output RGB24, 16-235 (or at least a relatively squished color range) -
squishedI was able to get all of them looking good with the right settings but the squishiness is the key to getting the colors right.
If you have a squished codec and you want to frameserve to CCE, you must frameserve in RGB so that you can tell CCE to leave the luminance alone (set 0-255). You can't feed it YUY2 or it seems to squish and look bad.
If you have a non-squished codec and you want to frameserve to CCE, you can feed it YUY2. If you feed it RGB, you need to set luminance levels to 16-235 (and let CCE squish the levels).
In terms of quality, I think the Sony codec (the standalone, not vegas) may be a touch funky on the reds - it is subtle. I thought the Panasonic looked as good as the Vegas internal stuff when all was set right. I didn't spend too much time trying to get the Microsoft codec looking good as 3rd party codecs are recommended, even by Microsoft. When you get the squish factor wrong the difference is not so subtle. It's either way too zingy or totally hazed over.
As far as encoders go, it appears that:
Vegas encoder (Main Concept) wants a squishy source (like it's internal codec or the Sony codec).
CCE is configurable for RGB sources, but if you're feeding it YUY2 it needs a non-squishy codec.
I haven't used TMPGEnc in a bit - it has similar parameters around the color space (the setting is under MPEG settings, quantize matrix, Output YUV data...) When the box is checked, I believe it's the 'no touch' option, similar to CCE's 0-255 range.
Any feedback from more knowledgable sources is welcome! I'd like to put Procoder thru the same tests.
I'll try and post some screen grabs.