Canopus's ProCoder has been unchallenged as a media encoder for a good few years. Despite competition from Compressor on the Mac platform and Sorenson Squeeze, ProCoder managed to do just about everything right and deliver phenomenal results to boot.

MPEG encoding for DVD was terrific. Windows Media and RealVideo crunching for the net was great too. Most of all, ProCoder shined in its sheer convenience, allowing users to create batches for encoding, or even specify watch folders so that the program could start work on a new file as soon as it became available.

In the last couple of years, though, ProCoder seemed to have fallen behind the times somewhat - particularly in its lack of direct support for HDV transport streams and its inability to export Dolby AC3 audio files with its elementary MPEG files.

Version 3 of the program has, therefore, been eagerly anticipated by existing users who increasingly found themselves stepping away from their favourite encoding suite to crunch their media.

At first glance, ProCoder doesn't appear to have changed much. Unlike recent changes to Grass Valley's Edius editing software, the general user interface is largely untouched since version 2, being composed of Source, Target and Convert tabs under which selections are made and settings tweaked.

As before, there are also buttons for the creation of watch folders and queues. The first sign of redevelopment comes when a clip is imported for encoding, as ProCoder 3 will now accept AVCHD footage, H.264 video and Dolby AC3 audio files as source media.

Source files are collected in a list in the Source panel, and can have their attributes examined and, in some cases, changed. If, for example, your source footage has been prepared with the wrong aspect ratio flag, this can be reassigned in ProCoder's source panel.

New to the toolbox, however, is the fact that ProCoder now allows you to select an alternative audio file for movie encoding, rather than simply using the video file's own sound - a bonus for anyone who's in the habit of mixing sound in external audio editors.

Advanced features at the target stage include trimming tools, by which tops and tails can be discarded without putting footage through an editing program first.