• Compression Techniques

  ProRes LT to H.264 in Compressor – How to reduce compression times?

  Posted by Josh Haggard on July 30, 2011 at 1:32 am

  I am compressing a ProRes LT 720p30 sequence to H.264 using Ken Stone’s vimeo settings:

  https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/vimeo_hd_compressor_douglas.html

  The only changes I have made are:
  Data Rate: 2500 K/Bs
  Streaming: Fast start

  I am using MacBook Pro with 2.66Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM

  I also send the sequence straight to compressor from FCP.

  40 minutes of video takes around 5 hours to compress.

  Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reduce compression time?

  What are the limiting hardware features on compression times? Is it CPU/RAM/GPU?
  Would compression times be greatly reduced by buying a beefy Mac Pro?
  Any word on virtual clusters? Or even networkingmultiple Macbook Pro’s to use as a cluster?
  I have had mixed advice on exporting from FCP and then importing to compressor rather than using the ‘send to’ function – I am in the middle of a job so don’t want to experiment with my workflow at the moment.

  Thanks,
  JH

  Craig Seeman replied 14 years, 9 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Craig Seeman

  July 31, 2011 at 4:31 pm

  Many factors influence compression time. I’d say Core2Duo might be your weak link though.
  A MacPro would help.
  Clustering would help.
  A MacBookPro with Express port and Matrox MXO2Mini with MAX h.264 acceleration would help.
  Using single pass instead of multipass would help (but may impact quality).

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