H.264 Pro Recorder - encode to 4:2:2 ?

The H.264 Pro Recorder product description states " Get the highest quality 4:2:2 video capture from all popular SD/HD video formats".

Using the limited settings given in Media Express, I am only able to capture and encode analogue SD PAL to H.264 4:2:0. Am I misinterpreting the marketing information? Has anyone achieved 4:2:2 encoding? Is this only possible for a SDI input ?

See if http://dgarygrady.com/2011/08/10/video- ... 422-color/ helps explain that there is probably no benefit to 4:2:2 for PAL. Probably is a technical reason why the Pro Recorder doesn't do it also.

Pro Recorder simply doesn't support 4:2:2 recording.
It's designed to create "preview" h264 files, which are in 95% 4:2:0 as this is enough for highly compressed files.

4:2:2 vs. 4:2:0 makes much bigger difference for interlaced content. For progressive there is no that big difference in real world, but your master files should ideally be at least 4:2:2 (when you do keying or heavy VFX work then you ideally need 4:4:4).
4:2:0 is for end consumer delivery, like web, etc.

Thank you for the replies. I also submitted my query to BMD support. They confirmed the pro recorder can ingest 4:2:2 chroma subsampled video, but will only output 8-bit 4:2:0 chroma subsampled video. They will change the website as suppose this could be interpreted as misleading advertising.

I am experimenting with analogue video restoration and wanted to compare quality loss of HI422 H.264 profile to 4:2:2 lossless to possibly save disk space. Once the computational intensive restoration processing is complete, the restored video is delivered in 4:2:0 H.264.