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Delivering my material on Blu-Ray and the web!! HELP!
Hi,
I own a Matrox MXO2 and I use it with my MacPro. I primarily shoot with Sony EX3 and edit in FCP, and use Color and AE.
Everything works great and I find my creations are flowing beautifully… however I can feel myself getting older everytime I need to deliver material to my clients on Blu-Ray or the web. It is just a painfully long process.
I’ve been reading about Matrox’s CompressHD and it sounds like it would be the magic bullet I need…. BUT! Before I take the dive into this product I was wondering if anyone here has some advice or working knowledge on this product. Does it do what it says it can? Will it help me be a more productive creator? -
5 Replies
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It does look like a compelling product however compression comes in all shapes and sizes. Episode is still the best all around tool, and having solid compressor skills helps. Tools like MPEGStreamclip are also part of the arsenal.
CompressHD is fine for accelerating H264 encoding, but that is only part of the picture. Of course now that Flash supports H264 there is the chance that it could become 70% or more of our encoding tasks.
dI have an Octo Mac and I have to say that it performs very well with anything we throw at it. Would the CompressHD be faster? Probably. Make me altogether more productive…maybe.
I think it depends on your workload…if you are doing 90% H264 encoding and you need speed, it’s a great option. But if you need a great swiss army knife of encoders, Episode is a great start.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
Rich,
Thanks for your input. From what I gather Episode would take all(most)of my systems power to do the same job the compressHD + Compressor would do. I am I right? If so, why would I spend $495 on Episode and have it hog my system while the Matrox compressHD ($495) would do the heavy lifting so I can continue creating other projects?
Am I missing something or can you combine the power of CompressHD with Episode?An Artist At Heart.
Life is made of moments… -
If anything Episode let’s me do a lot more on my system. Not sure about hogging my computer…I regularly do up to 5 or six tasks at once on my computer and several projects might be encoding at the same time. I do have a multi-core machine however.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
you have it right. the CPU’s will still be mostly available for other things, and its still faster then CPU encoding. if you turn out a lot of H.264, it pays for itself pretty quickly, especially if you like to go home at a decent hour. I”ve got one and I’m quite happy with it.
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Episode is both versatile and fast. There are MPEG2 presets for Blu-ray but not H.264.
I use both Telestream Episode and Matrox CompressHDI took a 48 minutes speech and I shot on a Sony EX camera at 1080p30 and encoded to 1080i Blu-ray H.264 in 47 minutes. Basically CompressHD will do the encode in about the running time of the piece.
Episode using it’s MPEG2 1080i preset will take considerably longer on my MacPro 2.8GHz 8 Core 8GB RAM and MPEG2 is a less efficient codec.I love Episode for sure but CompressHD is targeting to one codecH.264 and does is faster than other single machine methods I know of.
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