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Fast Proxies
Hi All,
Just did an install of catdv/cache-a and I’m trying to generate my proxies as quickly as possible. Looks like its taking 1.5 times realtime. Is there a setting to do it quicker? I’ve tried h264 and photojepeg, but it is slow. And I read about x264, but I can’t get that to pop up in the proxy settings window. I’m now trying mpeg4, but that seems just as slow. I am running a windows 7 computer.
The workflow is from xdcam disk to hard drive to proxies to cache-a. The proxies will be viewed for transcribing and used to search with when the full-res clips are archived.
Oh, and I don’t have the worker node.
Thanks for your help!
Nick
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5 Replies
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You’re pretty much limited to the processes in the app if you don’t have the Worker.
XD is hard to transcode as anyone will tell you. Long GOP is a killer.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Will the worker encode the proxies any faster?
Thanks,
Nick
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The quickest codec to encode TO is PhotoJPEG; H264 is quite a bit slower. If it’s taking a long time regardless of the codec you use the problem may well lie with decoding the format you’re converting FROM, in which case there isn’t much you can do. Are you creating full size proxies? Reducing the size by an exact factor of two (which is an option in Worker 5 and CatDV 10) might help slightly.
If you have a single worker it won’t encode any faster than CatDV as it uses exaclty the same engine internally (unless you use the worker to control an external encoder such as Episode or Rhozet). However, you can have multiple worker instances running on the same machine. Each individual file will take just as long but you can be processing several files in parallel for faster throughput.
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The “unpack” time on long GOP formats like XDCAM are what gets you.
And yes, the Worker is the same engine, I was talking about using something heavier to transcode like Rolf mentioned.
However, if you have more money than tech savvy, you can also buy multiple instances of the Worker and have them run on one machine. This is a dead simple way to “cluster”.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Thanks guys!
I will try tweaking the settings you suggested and go from there. I’m not super tech savvy, so the simpler the better.
Nick
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