thanks,
the Lacie offering looks promising, but if I read the review properly you still have to export the project out as a quicktime. Does anyone out there have one of these things? If so, can you play a project straight off of FCP out to this encoder or do you have to send it out as a quicktime file first?
maybe I should just contact Lacie and ask them myself, but its more fun to be lazy and rely on the good graces of others.


-Ethan Cooper
NY Productions

Ethan,

Bob Hudson visits this site some times but if you contact him from his web site he is very willing to respond. He can tell you anything yo uneed to know about it.

You do have to export a movie out of FCP first then bring it into Fast Coder.

Hi Ethan,

I found out that you can do background encoding with DVDSP while you work on the rest of the project. That won't help as far as coming straight out of FCP into the hardware encoder but it will save time if you use it right. When I got ready to burn my project, the only remaining encode was for the menus and transitions. After that, the burn process went really fast since the video and audio were already done.

The LaCie offering does sound interesting. Thanks Dave for bringing it to our attention.

-gb-

hey greg,
background encoding just isnt fast enough for our use most of the time. I do wedding videos as a side business and often those encodes take up to 12 hours (ouch). For that reason alone this $250.00 LaCie encoder is sounding better by the minute.
I don't like the fact that you have to export out a dv clip to use it (extra hard drive space eaten up, especially with hour long or more weddings) but even that sounds better than waiting 12 hours for an encode to finish up.
I'm very tempted to bite now, but I'm going to wait and see what NAB brings us this year. It just seems to me that this hardware encoder idea is too good for some other company to pass up, but I could be wrong and have been often in the past.
So now the hard part will be sitting around waiting another month to see the new toys and not spending my cash now. Maybe I can convince my boss that we need one at work.

-Ethan Cooper
NY Productions

Of course you can sit around another month to see what everyone is going to announce and when they do you can sit around for another 6-12 months waiting for them to actually hit the market OR you can just go buy something and use it now.
If you really "need" it, (meaning you do enough volume that you can't afford to wait 12 hours for an encode) you should just buy one, it would pay for itself before anything else even hit the market, otherwise you didn't really need it anyway and you have time to wait (and save) until you do need it.
Besides, it's not like you actually have to sit there the whole time watching it encode, and the weddings over, so what's the hurry? (jk;)