Promise ATA 100 Controller probs and slow encoding! HELP!!!!

[SaigonK]

Got a Promise Ultra ATA100 Tx2 controller for my Abit BF6 motherboard to help speed up encoding times with mpeg2 files, installed it and
when encoding it still takes the same amount of time....
Here are the system specs:
Abit BF6 - PIII-750 - 768meg ram
Maxtor 30gig 7200rpm ATA100 drive - IBM GXP 60gig 7200 rpm ATA100 drive.
Pioneer A03 dvd-r
Acer 50x cdrom
Pinnacle Systems DV500 Plus video card (input/output)
Creative labs Geforce256 agp card
Windows 2000 - SP2

When i select the drives in the Device manager they show up fine, but i cannot select "write cache" it is greyed out..
so it is not enabled..dont know why..any ideas..and does it matter?
If i copy a huge file from the d: drive to the c: drive (1.2gig) it only takes about 30 seconds.
On my PIII866 Asus CUSL2 machine it takes a few minutes to do the same file,
so it would appear that the controller is working with both cards on it.
I export the videos by opening premiere-6 and selecting export movie...then i choose my destination (d: drive since it is 60gig) and it comes up taking upwards of five hours...just like before....i would expect with the throughput from the controller card i should see about a 30% (more or less) increase in speed thus shorter encodes....
Anyone got any ideas?
Perhaps an uninstall of Premiere and a reinstall?
HELP! and Thx!

 

[JohnnyPC]

I would figure that encoding is not limited by the speed of the drive system...rather it's how much computing "horsepower" you have. The weak link in the chain isn't the drives or controller, it's the processor. It can only do so much work independent of how well everything else is tuned up...

 

[SaigonK]

I have always been told that its all about the drives and not the CPU....any care to clarify?

 

[Ronstang]

I have always been told that the bottleneck to mpeg encoding was the CPU. I recently heard someone say that when they simply went from a 800mhz or so machine to an XP 1800 they dropped their encodeing time by almost 2/3. I can't verify this but it is what I heard.

 

[StormRider]

Encoding is CPU intensive. That's when you take the original video signal and mathematically "compress" the information into a smaller file size. You want a fast CPU to encode the video data -- especially if you are doing it in real time or "on the fly".

Capturing video (without encoding) is I/O intensive. You want a fast I/O system (IDE controller and hard drive) to be able to store the video information as you capture it in real time. If your I/O system is slow, then you might drop some frames.

If you are capturing video and encoding it "on the fly", then it's more important to have a fast CPU. Because when you encode the video information (i.e. to MPEG2 format), you are compressing it and therefore you are not saving as much information to disk as when it was not encoded (raw video information).

For example, capturing raw video frames might require saving 20 to 30 mbytes/sec of information to disk. However, if you are encoding it to MPEG2, then you only need to save about 9 mbytes/sec of information to the hard drive.