And a One and a Two…
But do not close those preferences down yet. The most precious preference settings at your disposal in the new RealProducer Plus fall under the "Video Codec" tab. Here, RealProducer Plus gains Two-pass and Variable Bitrate encoding. With Two-Pass, the software will "watch" your entire video clip before it begins encoding. This way, the encoder will know what to expect before it has to crunch the numbers. Ideally, the encoder will be able to compensate for encoding difficulties by this increased understanding of your clip. Variable Bitrate encoding varies the bitrate depending on the needs of the actual footage. A more demanding passage, such as a video dissolve, will gain more data. A quieter area of your clip will not consume any more resources than necessary to maintain consistent quality.

Both of these capabilities are what one would expect from more expensive encoding bundles. These are very welcome additions to RealProducer Plus.

There are some catches for using these features. Two-pass will obviously increase your encoding time since it needs to go through your media twice. Variable Bitrate encoding will slow down the launch of your material in the RealPlayer. You can adjust this latency but you do so at risk to the quality of your streaming media. All this said, both of the Variable Bitrate and Two-pass problems are worth the increased quality of the clip.