HD For Indies

In a previous article, I'd linked to a useful article that discussed how to substantially increase your Compressor 3 encoding times. They made brief mention of how to make the necessary adjustments "in System Prefs" but I went and looked and at first blush (10 seconds spent) didn't see how to do it. Then I was encoding some 720p24 footage on the Mac Pro to high def H.264, and realized, after seeing it still had a couple of hours to go "Ya know, I really should figure that out...right about NOW." So I went and figured it out, and for your edification, here's a walkthrough of exactly how to do it, click by click, as a screen grab walkthrough.

Click here to go to the picture page, and Start Slideshow will walk you through the Step By Step.

Wave the mouse over the picture to see the pause/forward/back controls - da usual iWeb stuff.

How many instances to launch? Depends on your machine, but if you're a dual or quad core box, 2 is almost CERTAINLY going to be an improvement over the default single instance. The BareFeats article's chart showed an 8 core Mac Pro doing best with 8 instances, so as many as you have cores is one possible answer - but It Could Depend, I don't know yet, and I don't know exactly WHAT it depends on as well - bus speeds? Source clip datarate & disk transfer rate? How compute intensive or light the encoding is per frame? Long GOP vs. I-frame only - does it substantially affect optimal # of cores? I'll have the interns do some benchmarking next week hopefully to learn some more, but I'm certain whatever answers are learned, carefully qualifying those answers with details on testing methodology will be key.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut Studio 2, NLE, software