System for Massive Amounts of Encoding

[Pariah]

How exactly do you think that he's going to get those multi-gigabyte files to and from the hard drives to be encoded?

He specifically said he did not need to capture it. So it might already be on the system, he just needs the additional drive to store the encoded material. What if the footage is DV? What good is RAID going to do then?

Have you tried opening a 2-hour raw capture?

I don't know what kind of system you are running, but it takes a few seconds to open a 20GB DV file in Premiere on my system. What is there to open if you are simply encoding the file? He says nothing about editing the material anyway.

What do you think you are accomplishing by being so outright rude to everyone? Do you think that makes your opinion anymore supportable?

 

[Megatomic]

Originally posted by: Pariah

What do you think you are accomplishing by being so outright rude to everyone? Do you think that makes your opinion anymore supportable?

I was wondering the same thing myself. Just look at his sig... :| He's still mad that most of us didn't care about the 5900 Ultra taking up two PCI slots I guess.

Back on topic, I'm gonna follow this thread as I have a similar task ahead of me. I don't have thousands of hours to encode but I do have many years of family movies to get on DVD. Make it good guys.

 

[TROGDORdBURNINATOR]

He specifically said he did not need to capture it. So it might already be on the system, he just needs the additional drive to store the encoded material. What if the footage is DV? What good is RAID going to do then?

I meant get it to his CPU.

I don't know what kind of system you are running, but it takes a few seconds to open a 20GB DV file in Premiere on my system. What is there to open if you are simply encoding the file? He says nothing about editing the material anyway.

Sure if it's not a project and you're not detecting scenes or anything like that. If he's rendering it then it's likely already been through the project form with a template layed out and maybe even a bunch of files which need to be combined to be rendered. He should expect long delays with a poor storage system.

Someone already linked to some hard benchmarks which support this point. But of course, no one cares about those on this forum.

What do you think you are accomplishing by being so outright rude to everyone? Do you think that makes your opinion anymore supportable?

No. I expect the fact that it's so obviously and unavoidably right to anyone but an inexperienced fool to make it supportable.

 

[Pariah]

I don't have thousands of hours to encode but I do have many years of family movies to get on DVD. Make it good guys.

If all you want to do is transfer video from home movies onto DVD without any editing, it can be done very easily for around $500. Assuming the footage isn't DV, you should get a Canopus ADVC-100 which takes any analog source and converts it to DV for easy transferring into a computer. Then get an HP DVD+RW drive which comes with very simple to use DVD creation software. You don't need any fancy hardware, though the encoding process will take a decent amount of time no matter how good your CPU is, nothing else in the system needs to be top notch.

 

[Megatomic]

Thanks Pariah. I'll look into that. What would I get if I wanted to also re-encode digital media into other formats and stream it on a private LAN?

 

[Pariah]

Regardless of what you plan to do with the footage once you get it in the computer, I would recommend the Canopus ADVC-100 to get it there because it is the easiest tool out there, and DV transfering is not taxing at all on the system. DV is also very easy to work with once on the computer. Once it is on the computer, you don't need to buy anything to encode DivX, WMP or most other formats.

 

[zephyrprime]

I'm going to be using windows media encoder. All I've tested it on now is my main desktop, which is an 800 MHz AMD Athlon, 1 GB ram. Takes about 30 mins per minute for the settings I use. Nice huh?

Given the information here:
linky
and here, I would estimate that a HT 3GHZ P4 with SSE would be about ~6x faster than your 800MHz athlon. This estimate is very crude but I believe it gives a valid general figure.

If you have 2000 hours of video and each hour takes 30hrs to encode on your 800mhz athlon and the P4 3Ghz is 6x faster, it would take 1.14 YEARS to complete your encode operation with one processor.

One more option: Lease a bunch of computers from Dell for this job. Then just return them after a month of two. Don't have to build or install anything this way. Labor efficient.