Need advice on outfitting a G5 to encode HD MPEG 4 material

[Jerry Hofmann]

You’ll need a serious capture card, and a serious disk array to work in uncompressed HD… A great solution is a Kona 2 Card from AJA, and a Very FAST array from Huge Systems, or possibly Medea or Apple’s X Serve RAID… I don’t believe there is a card that will capture MPEG-4 from an HD machine on the fly… so you’d have to capture it uncompressed, then encode the stream on your computer.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Uli Plank]

To encode H.264 (aka MPEG 4 AVC or Part 10) you’ll need serious computing power. I don’t know of any hardware solution yet, but Apple supports distributed compression by QMaster, so get the number of Macs you can afford and network them for compression.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Trinity Greer]

OPTIBASE has a realtime HD mpeg encoder card for the mac. Not sure if it is Mpeg 4 or not. While the cow is a great place for help, you need more focused attention to find the right solution. I recomend contacting a system integration specialist. If you have someone else that installs a system, you have a someone to goto incase it has problems. I use Kenny Martin https://dvserve.tv/ . He is honest, knowledgeable, and won’t sell you more than you need. He reps a lot of different companys so he won’t push the product unless its the right one. He is San certified and platform agnostic. He speaks engineer and can break things down for the less technical. FYI I don’t get a commision just respect his work.