DV Info Net - Best Quality Encoders for FCP

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Clark (Post 1440508)

** Pardon my lack of knowledge here regarding acronyms....but what are "FCB" files?

A "B" came out instead of a "P", sorry.

Quote:

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As far as quality, speed and usability go, I have a Qmaster with 48 cores available to Compressor for rendering, and the CompressHD card easily and significantly outperforms it. Part of the reason is that .h264 encoding doesn't seem to be "shared" between cores the same way that an MP4 file is. When I view the activity monitor when encoding Mpeg4 all the CPU's are maxed out, but when viewing during an .h264 encode sometime they are but not usually.

Hmmm... that is interesting...wonder why that is?!

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.... I'm just starting to experiment with Blu-ray so I don't really have anything to report yet but we are starting to do all of our encoding for the web, wireless and Apple devices using this card. I'm not a web guy and apparently there are some resolutions they would like that this card doesn't support, however for the majority of the ones it does support not only is this card faster but the quality is as good as Compressor if not better.....

Yeah I noticed that too when reading up on this on the Matrox website.

Thanks Chuck for sharing your insight; much appreciate it!!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mitchell Lewis (Post 1440447)

You can also buy one of these and accomplish the same quick H.264 encoding times.

Elgato Turbo.264 HD

I think they sell for $125 on Amazon.

I add my vote for this brilliant device. I don't have a need for the higher bit rates or cluster capabilities of the Matrox device but for creating high quality H.264 video this device is a bargain. It will convert 1920x1080 ProRes files to 1920x1080 10Mbps H.264 in about real time or better & the quality is really excellent. Also like the Matrox board it can be accessed from Compressor & MPEG Streamclip so that your workflow remains the same just much faster.

Nigel, I am going from a G5 Quad to a new Mac Pro 2 x 2.4 Ghz and from FCS2 to 3. I assume the Mac Pro is going to blow me away with its speed, especially producing h.264. I can't find any info on how this Elgato stick works in terms of using the CPU of the computer.
What I'd like to know is: will the Elgato HD substantially improve compression time even on the newest mac Pro's? (and how does it do it, if you will...)

The newest 12-core MacPro towers I can't tell you, but it's faster than my 8 core when it comes to producing h.264.

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Originally Posted by William Hohauser (Post 1575888)

The newest 12-core MacPro towers I can't tell you, but it's faster than my 8 core when it comes to producing h.264.

Same here & it does it so fast because it has a dedicated H.264 hardware encoder chip.

When it comes to h.264 the number of cores doesn't make that much difference.

In the recent update to the Pro Apps Apple included a Compressor setting for the iPad, which is 14 Mb's, but YouTube and Vimeo, for example, won't accept anything above 5 Mb's, and that doesn't stream very well on the iPad.

I'd like to hear other's experiences with encoding for the iPad, with or without Elgato's Turbo.264 HD.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck Spaulding (Post 1576009)

When it comes to h.264 the number of cores doesn't make that much difference.

I've read that somewhere else: were you the one that brought that up, Chuck? I believe the argument was that only mpeg4 compression took advantage of the cores. But then someone argued, and from what I've read rightfully so: h.264 is a flavor of mp4

So please elaborate, Chuck.

I don't know that much about the intricacies of h.264 and mp4, but I have a couple of X-Serves and use Qmaster to render XDCAM projects across about 48 processors. I think XDCam is some flavor of Mpeg2 and when I submit the job the fans kick in, the processors are pegged, and it renders quickly.

When I distribute h.264 encodes across the same Qmaster network the fans barely make a burble, the processors vary between 30 and 50% and it takes significantly longer.

I'm sure there's a programmer who can explain why this is, but h.264 really benefits from hardware acceleration.

Come to think of it we render .mp4 files for a producer that uses the WDHD player and it max's out the processors too. Isn't h.264 Apples version of .mp4?