Creating Proxies with Matrox’s CompressHD PCIe card

[Bryson Jones]

I’m gonna try to keep this in both but it’s relevant here too.

Have you tested the system outside of CatDV? Could you do the same job in Compressor and QT Pro and see what the results are? I’m curious.

Also, just so we have it, can you shoot out the OS and other versions?

bryson

bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

hidefcowboy.com

[Eric Strand]

So it appears it is not when the proxy is made in CatDV. I had the same bad results when I opened the file in QT Pro 7 and exported it. The file from Compressor plays fine and is an expected size for the quality setting. I should have tested this yesterday but did not have time before I left work. Didn’t know if anyone else had come across this.

QT Pro 7.6.6
OS Lion 10.7.3
Matrox Compress HD with drivers 2.4.0.0014
Compressor 3.5.3
CatDV 9.0.6

[Matthew Stamos]

I just did a project with the Matrox and it worked great the biggest benefit is not so much the speed but the host CPU is not taxed hardly at all during the encode. Operates with the Worker Node and Episode too which offers great workflow possibilities.

[Ray Kowalchuk]

This solution is Mac only; is it possible to create proxies with timecode track with the Matrox Compress HD in a Windows environment? I guess the Matrox MAX H.264 acceleration only works in Adobe Encoder on a PC, but the proxy creation can be externalized.

Matt, by “not so much the speed” do you mean that it’s not much faster?

[Bryson Jones]

It is faster, but I believe he’s saying that a great benefit is that it frees up the machine to do other things. Important if you are running Worker on a server box.

Personally, I’m more of a fan of handing proxy creation off to a transcoding program and leaving a Worker node to do actions.

Remember, if it’s transcoding, it’s not doing anything else and so a few hours of video can monopolize your Worker Node. That same box running some outside software (Episode, Compressor, etc,) could be handing off those jobs and then getting back to doing other operations. Nothing like a server query not running for 30 minutes while you’re compressing a file.

One new thing for NAB, the Worker Node can be licensed to run multiple Worker instances on the same machine, so one 8 core machine can have several Workers on it, doing different actions, which is nice.

bryson

bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

hidefcowboy.com

[Eric Strand]

Wanted to post an update for this thread. I spent a bunch of time going back and forth with Matrox’s support, they had great support by the way, and we narrowed down the issue being the frame rate setting in the Movie > Settings> Frame Rate dialog box. Instead of using “Current Rate”, you have to manually set the frame rate to the frame rate of your footage, e.g. 29.97 or 23.976. When you do that, the compressed files end up with the correct data rate and playback smoothly.