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Video editing and encoding- better hardware needed?

G

ginfest

Golden Member
Wow, just getting in to this and it's quite a load. I have donea lot of research and have the basics including software down.
I still have many ??? but I guess the most relevant is this:
When encoding with my machine, 2.5 G P4 (oc either 2.66G/140FSBx4 or 2.85G/150FSBx3 ), 512 Rdram and 2-80 GB hard drives it can take anywhere from 6-20+ hours depending on many factors, length/time, bitrate, pre and post processing, etc.
What upgrade will improve these times if any? My machine is obviously fairly "fast" but encoding brings it to it's knees.
My thought are SCSI RAID, Dual/Hyperthreading CPU, more RAM? Do I need any or all of these and would any or all cut the time in a meaningful way-say 10%, 20%, or more?
Or is encoding just that far beyond home machines at this time?

TIA for you comments and suggestions,
Mike G
 
HD performance is not part of it. It's all CPU. Maybe some more ram would help. I run P4@ 2.4 GHz, 512 Meg of ram @ DDR400 and a single WD 1200JB. I notice that all of my ram is used when encoding to MPEG2. What exactlty are you encoding? What program, format, length, size, etc?
 
You could probably benefit from some more ram, but I doubt that's a serious issue for you at this point. If you're encoding mpeg2 you could possibly look at a hardware based mpeg2 board, but be prepared to pay some serious money. If you're doing divx encodes then a fast cpu is all that will matter.
 
What are you encoding? And to what format?

I have done some DivX encoding of movies (strictly for backup purposes), and even with max quality settings, I can still do a complete 2-pass encode in 3-5 hours. And this is a 2+ hour movie. This with an 1.9ghz equivalent AMD XP 1900, with only a mere 256MB RAM.

I have seen that in many cases, an AMD processor will be significantly for video encoding than an equivalent speed Pentium, so you might consider looking into confirming this. If so, you deal with it, you change something, or you get an AMD.
 
Dont know why it is taking hime do long. My P4 rig has no speed issues. I can do an MPEG2 2 pass VBR in ~ 3 Hrs. P4 is great for media encoding.
 
Any ideas on what software to use? I've heard good things about Adobe Premiere, but if your budget doesn't allow for $500+ of software, you might want to consider something else. I got a used copy of Ulead Videostudio 6; I imagine that it's not the greatest editing software out there (v7 just came out too), but it seems quite functional. It seems fairly speedy; maybe 5-10fps on an XP1700 system with 512MB PC2100 RAM. That's re-encoding an MPEG2 file to a DVD compliant MPEG2 file - I then will use MovieFactory to convert that to true DVD format. If you get both programs new directly from Ulead, it'll be about $140 (download price) or $150 plus shipping to get the boxed version. That's considerably cheaper than Adobe's stuff.
I had also tried freeware apps; I think I used FlaskMPEG, because it was one of the only programs I could find that could both read my MPEG2 files (recorded on a WinTV PVR-350) and output to MPEG2. The interface was buggy, the program crash prone, and the MPEG encoder (bbMPEG) was very slow - it hovered around 3-4 fps.

Yes, encoding is a very intensive process that needs a really powerful system if you want it to encode it in less than twice the actual playtime of the video. My current "video station" system has 2 HD's in RAID 0, 512MB RAM, and the XP1700 proc (XP1500@1700 actually). Yes, I'd like faster, but I'd really do better to replace the motherboard, RAM, and processor with something faster; just can't afford that now though.
 
I have a lot of home movies taken with my mini-DV camera and some other stuff I want to get on DVD.
Here's what got me thinking that I might need more "oompf" in my machine:
The project was an multiple avi conversion to DVD
From what I've read at "DVDHelp" and "Doom9" among others, I decided to use VirtualDub, TMPenc and IfoEdit.
The most time consuming:
I had 2 small avis and figured that I'd combine them onto 1 DVD -R
From what I could gather in a couple days reading, I did the following:
Combined the avis with VirtualDub and used VD to check for bad or missing frames. I then edited the frames.
I then demuxed the PCM audio stream as I was going to use TMPGenc to encode the avi into mpg as supposedly it's better to encode the video separately, using Elementary Stream output and being frame served from VD.
I also converted the uncompressed PCM wav to AC3, I wasn't sure how big the encoded video file would be depending on the bitrate and quality settings I used in TMPGenc, hence I wasn't sure if I could fit uncompressed audio on the DVD.
For 2-pass VBR(3000 min/8000 max) at 5000 avg, estimated motion search (fast, quality depending on the content) it took approx 8 hrs.
For the heck of it, I set a higher bitrate and best quality motion search and the timer estimated 30 hours!
I used TMPGenc because supposedly it's one of the best in it's class for quality work although maybe slower than some others.
Anyway, I'm still working on the end result, I'm now authoring the DVD (s) in IfoEdit for burning.
It seems that the encoding "tradeoff" is between time and quality. From what I've read, the settings that I used will only produce an avg quality DVD , and still took 8 hours.
Tha's what got me thinking, does my machine need more "oomp" . Most "heavy" programs that I use such as Autocad, Photoshop and some database stuff didn't make it feel that the computer was working in slo-mo like the encoding process!
Mike G
 
There are a lot of SW packages out there that do different things. What do you want to do? Capture DV or analog? Edit with menus/chapters/transitions? Convert to MPEG1 VCD, MPEG2 SVCD, MPEG2 DVD? VBR? CBR? DiVX encoding? "Backup"
rolleye.gif
a DVD-9 movie to DVD-5? To DiVX? Compress to a small MPEG or WMF for internet use?

There are so many different things to do and different programs out there. You have to clearly know exactly what you are trying to accomplish.

For HW, as fast as you can get. Fast CPU, lots of ram. HD I/O matters very little.

GinFest's HW looks like it's up to the task. Maybe he is using the wrong SW program?
 
Ok, I missed that last post. You are making it WAY too difficult! TMPGEnc is great for VCD/SVCD work. The 2 pass VBR is needed to squeeze a movie onto a 700 Meg CDR. For DVD-R, you have 4.5 Gigs to work with. You dont need all that heavy duty compression! You can easily have a high bitrate without all that work.

I use Pinnacle Studio 8 for this. It has great capture/edit/menu/transition features. It will encode in CBR, but that is all that is needed to DVD home movies. I've made a bunch of DVD=R movies from my DV cam captures. They came out really well. Pinnacle is a bit slow on the encoding, but not too bad. On my system, it takes ~ 3.75 x capture length to do the encode.

 
It took me so long to type a reply that I missed some of them:

"I have done some DivX encoding of movies (strictly for backup purposes), and even with max quality settings, I can still do a complete 2-pass encode in 3-5 hours. And this is a 2+ hour movie. This with an 1.9ghz equivalent AMD XP 1900, with only a mere 256MB RAM."

I must be doing this wrong
I ended up approx 3 hours of video that I wanted to encode, at the settings in the previous post. The combined avi was 1.6GB, after encoding I had a 5.6 GB .m2v file!
The uncompressed PCM audio stream is 1.9GB, the AC3 encoded one is approx 500 MB.
Looks like the remuxed file will need 2 DVDs.
Maybe my TMPGenc settings are wrong?
IfoEdit authored the DVD(s) OK but I think I'll go over procedure again before I burn.
thanks for the replies,
Mike G


 
OK,
"It will encode in CBR, but that is all that is needed to DVD home movies"

I guess all the reading made me "overthink" what it is that I want to do.
I'll try TMPenc with just CBR.

Thanks,
Mike G
 
3 Hrs of AVI 1.6 Gig? That sure doesn't sound right. Raw DV AVI capture is 13 Gig for 1 Hr. Are you trying to get 3 Hr of movie onto one DVD disk?
 
I appreciate the help but I seem to have this thing "cluster-f**ked". I've got so many files and webpages and note open, it's a mess!
I think that I better get more knowledgable b/4 I try to get pointers.
I'm going to go back and spend some more time getting on the right page.
Thanks anyway,
Mike G
 
If I could ask a simple question, maybe I sould point you in the right direction.

What are you trying to do? Capture DV video to burn onto a DVD-R? How much DV video do you want to fit on one disk?
 
Hard drive speed does matter as far as performance for the encoding goes; if 3-7% margins are your thing then IDE RAID or SCSI may be the thing for you. Memory speed is more of the issue than hard drive speed, since you want to stream from memory and not off the hard drive. You can encode with a 2.2 GHz P4-Celeron generally as fast as any AMD chip out there if you're using newer software. AMD chips are good with the encoding, but the P4 design is designed around this type of work and therefore it has a huge advantage in this area.

Actually, the higher the bitrate, and some of the other settings, the more you will benefit from the faster hard drive speeds. On low end systems it is not a help. In your higher end systems the HD access becomes an obvious bottleneck. Did anyone warn you how fast hard drives die when you use them for this streaming sh!t? Don't do the encoding on the same drive you store anything precious because they do tend to fail quickly from multimedia. Using a secondary array on its own controller; SCSI is your friend!
 
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