[franc11s]

I have bought Pinnacle 8.0 including Hoolywood FX and a SOny drx-500ul DVD+R+RW (firewire).


I then went to encode some MPEG 2 video that I'd put together (originally that came in as DV through my firewire) and realised 1.8mhz CPU isn't enough.


What hardware can I get that will work with Pinnacle that makes the encoding process faster, what's the fastest I can get and how much faster could it be. Also, any idea of the range of the costs versus performance.


Thanks ever so,

 

[vferrari]

If you output your video from the timeline via firewire into a compatible standalone DVD recorder such as the Panasonic HS2 or Pioneer 7000 decks ($750 to $1000) you can encode your video in real time.


Short of that there is not much you can do through CPU or even memory upgrades to significantly speed up the software encode process on your PC. Of course more memory or a faster processor will always speed up the encode process but no PC hardware upgrades will improve software encoding to anywhere near real time. You can also trade off video quality to speed up the process. You didn't really say what performance you were getting now and what you hoped to achieve in terms of speed so its hard to give you more specific advice.


Vic

 

[franc11s]

I had read about a couple of Hardware encoder cards but since I'm new to this perhaps they are not for this purpose.


One such card was the Pinnacle http://www.videoguys.com/prooneRTDV.html


I also read about another cheaper one from Pinnacle and some others. They are called encoder cards and I thought they would help with passing the task of the encoding to a separate board. is that not correct.


Thanks for you help.

 

[franc11s]

Sorry, to answer your question. I had nearly 1 hour of .AVI recording (from my DV camera) that I wanted to combine into one MPEG file and it looked like it was going to take all night on my 1.8mhz CPU Pinnacle 7.(latest), going to 8 soon.


Thanks.

 

[Joe_M]

I'm assuming you mean 1.8Ghz for you CPU.

Have you tried a program called TMPGEnc? It's freeware with a 30 day MPEG2 use. After that you have to pay if you want to encode in MPEG2. There are pre-made templets that are setup for DVD encoding. You may find it faster than pinnacle. I've encoded a 1.5hr AVI to MPEG1 in about an hour and 40 mins using a 2.0Ghz P4. There's another program called REMPEG that may work as well. Check out VCDHelp.com or DOOM9.org for the files.

 

[franc11s]

I hear you. I'll try that. Did you check out the Pinnacle card... Is that what it's for - i.e. to speed up encoding ?

 

[vferrari]

Quote:

Did you check out the Pinnacle card... Is that what it's for - i.e. to speed up encoding ?

The Pinnacle card apparently has onboard hardware to accelerate mpeg2 encoding but it likely will not be real time hardware encoding. The primary purpose of the card is to enable real-time rendering and output of DV avi (not mpeg2). For the $800 to $950 price tag you could get an HS2 DVD recorder and get true real time hardware mpeg2 encoding. BTW, another consideration before you jump on this is that Studio 7/8 does not appear to be compatible with the Pinnacle Pro-One RTDV card so you will lose the intuitive editing interface of the Studio software and have to go with Adobe Premiere and its rather steep learning curve. You might want to look at other real time MPEG2 encoders for the PC such as those offered by Canopus. You will pay a lot to incorporate the hardware real-time encoding feature into a PC and I'm not sure it is worth it. What's wrong anyway with letting your computer chug along overnight to encode your video to mpeg2, you won't be using it when your asleep?


Vic

 

[dp70]

In my PC, I have a Matrox RT-2500 board (about a year old) that can do both hardware realtime MPEG-2 and slower, hardware-assisted MPEG-2. Both options work OK, but the quality is inferior to a good software encoder such as TMPGENC and there aren't nearly as many parameters that can be adjusted. I can't imagine the hardware realtime encoding in a consumer electronics device is any better, and second Vic's advice to use a software encoder where you will have better control over noise reduction, cropping, sharpening, etc.