[forumhound]

Just an interesting note, it seems that after years of low-budget video editing (both hardware-assisted and now not) that video seems to compress at real-time or worses, no matter how fast the computer's get? Seems like going to DVD (SD) now takes as long it did 4 years ago? Back then i had a pc with a matrox card and ...can't remember that compression software they bundled with it... and now i have MBP and iMac wishing for a usb blackmagic card but I am using compressor and its still the same speeds. i guess i was hoping for better.

anyone using compressor with qmaster for distributed work? i don't think it will work with FCP anyway, as FCP seems to not be able to release batch jobs off the timeline, unless I am missing something. well, cheers to speed!

FH

[moep]

Well, yes and no.

Computers do get faster but the files sizes and formats obviously don’t stay the same.

What I do wonder though is how long it will take Apple to ship computers with built in H.264 hardware encoder/decoder chips. The rumor has been around for a long time now. Maybe we’ll see encoding programs in 10.6 make use of GPUs? I don’t know how “massively parallel” an encoding job is or how efficient GPUs are for these tasks.

As for your Qmaster question, this link might be helpful. You should see a decent speed increase on your Dualcore iMac, I suppose.

http://provideocoalition.com/index.p...e_speed_boost/

[forumhound]

Originally Posted by moep 

Well, yes and no.

Computers do get faster but the files sizes and formats obviously don’t stay the same.

What I do wonder though is how long it will take Apple to ship computers with built in H.264 hardware encoder/decoder chips. The rumor has been around for a long time now. Maybe we’ll see encoding programs in 10.6 make use of GPUs? I don’t know how “massively parallel” an encoding job is or how efficient GPUs are for these tasks.

As for your Qmaster question, this link might be helpful. You should see a decent speed increase on your Dualcore iMac, I suppose.

http://provideocoalition.com/index.p...e_speed_boost/

u hit the nail right on the head, thx. we have better hardware now but the software is not using it as it could. thanks for the qmaster tip, i'll have to try that tonight!


edit: wow that tip is a great one! speeds to compress the same files just went up by almost 40%. now i wish i had an 8-core! thx again.

[mduell]

Even with the improvements in CPU performance, you've gone form expensive purpose-specific hardware to cheap generic hardware. Also the modern encoders are probably doing a lot more work to preserve quality since so much more CPU power is available.

[darcybaston]

That hasn't been my experience at all. I feel today's computers are wonderful at crunching old and new media, and in much less time than any of my previous computers. I can whip out orignial DVD content in a matter of hours on a dual core, vs. the all-day it took to make a 13GB DV NTSC file compress down to mp2 on a 933Mhz iBook G4.

Converting audio media gets faster and faster, and I can now do 24bit audio whereas on the ol' iBook I ran into cpu maxing real quick.

I can watch and create HD content now in a reasonable amount of time that my computers of yesteryear couldn't handle without severe inconveniences in system "too busy to do much else" time.