Neat Video & Neat Image community

As we all know NV can be a real drain when it comes to render times, but i have the firecoder blu hardware encoder card and use that to do my encode and the results are faster (although depending on your CPU - if you have 2 quad core cpus then you might not benefit from this, but since i'm only on a dual core 3.0Ghz its helps me out alot).

i'm doing an encode now so i can give exact figures ( will post tham after the encode ). But what i do is, I do all my editing in CS3 and then frameserve lossless AVI to tmpgenc 4 ( as this is required to use the harware encoding ) and then encode to H.264 HD. i know it might be a pain to use 3rd party software for some but this works for me very well.

I will post difference in render times with (using firecoder blu) and without (just using CPU) encoding later on today.

If others have hardware encoders i suggest you try them

Regards Marty.

I dont understand what difference a hardware encoder is to encoding normally with a program on your PC. Is it faster? If so how? It use a better CPU? I can have same CPU in my PC, no?

Lugarimo wrote:I dont understand what difference a hardware encoder is to encoding normally with a program on your PC. Is it faster? If so how? It use a better CPU? I can have same CPU in my PC, no?

It depends on your cpu or cpu's your using. in my case the hardware encoder is much faster than just using my cpu, The hardware encoder uses a quadcore cpu. Plus it saved me from buying a new PC (i'm using the fastest cpu my mother board can handle [AMD dual core 3.0Ghz]).

Here's a read up on the harware encoder i'm using and the software i'm using with it (although the video/audio is frameserved lossless from CS3) :

http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/produ ... spurs.html

Here are the encode times :

50 minute 720x576i DV video clip (NV used on the whole clip) encoded to h.264 720x576p :

just cpu : 9h 50min
hardware encode : 7h 20min

so its roughly about 75% speed increase

Encoding 50 minutes of that resolution takes less than 7 hours on my PC and I'm using an old one. Hardware encoding is too complicated for a newb and requires so many annoying steps. It's really not worth saving just 1 hour. Most people have dual or quad core computers now so NV isn't as horribly slow as it once was. Depends what you mean by slow anyway, to me anything 10 fps up is ok.

africanmarty wrote: Here are the encode times :

50 minute 720x576i DV video clip (NV used on the whole clip) encoded to h.264 720x576p :

just cpu : 9h 50min
hardware encode : 7h 20min

so its roughly about 75% speed increase

Actually, that's about 25% increase. Still considerable, since you're taking about 2.5 hours off the processing time.

What's the cost of a hardware encoder?