-
CatDV Pro and transcoding
Can CatDV Pro do multicore processing for transcoding? And, does anyone know if it is 64 bit? Thanks!
-
5 Replies
-
It uses the Quicktime engine so if the codec you use is 64bit then it’ll be 64bit. If you use a 32bit codec I think it launches a 32bit helper app. (why do they make it all so complex??!?!)
I’m pretty sure Quicktime supports multi-threading now, but that’s not my main area of expertise. Anyone wanna confirm that?
In my FAQ for this forum, if they’d even let us do one… I’d put “CatDV uses Quicktime for most video functions. All QT related features and limitations apply” as my first note. That’s the rule for the most part.
If you’re doing heavy transcodes, look to a Compressor cluster or something like Episode or Sorenson that’s made for the purpose. Transcoding is a feature of CatDV but not it’s focus of course. From your other posts it sounds like you may have a lot of files to deal with.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
-
HI Halle
if you look at your activity monintor , is Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor you will see whilst Catdv or the Worker are doing transcoding all of the cores are involved. There is a concept of “niceness” which means that you want your code to play ” nicely ” with other apps and not trample over other apps and cause digital mayhem . So within these parameters Catdv and Worker max out the cores.Kevin Duggan
CatDV/MME -
It’s down to individual codecs whether they support multi-threading or not. Some do but not all.
CatDV currently only uses the 32-bit QuickTime APIs.
-
Is there a way to make Worker Node and Compressor work together so I can trigger my proxies within CatDV, the proxies will be made in Compressor and the target file path will be created from Worker Node?
We told all our editors CatDV wouldn’t slow them down, and proxies could be made by changing the status to ‘Make Proxy’. We’re realizing now that worker node cannot keep up with the amount of footage we are throwing at it, so we are now running compressor over night to try and catch up. It would be nice to automate that, but is this possible? Compressor is a pain in the butt because I have to manually duplicate the file path, and Compressor changes the file name, so I have to manually change it back.
~ Nate
-
Yes Nate,
We set this up for clients all the time. I’d contact your dealer and have them set it up unless you’re handy with the command line. If you are, there’s a section in compressor’s manual on using the CLI.
I’d rather not go into detail here since there’s so much potential for things to go wrong with command line scripting and I don’t want to be responsible for the questions and problems that result from the various environments, Worker versions and Compressor versions possible. (I hope you guys can understand.)
But the basics are Worker that the worker sends the path to the file as a variable via the command as well as the path to the proxy location for file output. Compressor lets you choose a setting and other job prefs as different arguments in the command.
Very do-able and yes, it gives you back your Worker Node for other operations.
Note that the new Worker (v5) will also allow you to license multiple instances so that if you have an 8 core cpu, for instance, you can have 3 or 4 Worker Nodes running on one machine.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up