[Craig Leibowitz]

I am a V1/TD for Live events, and have been using Playback Pro quite a bit over the past few years. I recently had issues with some very large HD files as well, so I went out and bought my own system(for a crapload of money!!! says the PC guy..that’s me).
The solution is making sure you have the combination of a fast enough Hard Drive(7200rpm), and either a Raid Drive, or, in my case, I use an E-sata drive via PCI express port on a 17″ MacBook Pro Core i5. This gives me a max of 2.5Gbps throughput, which is much faster than the firewire 800 connection.
The DTVideo labs engineer sent me this when I emailed in to figure out what was up.

“Yes, an internal RAID 0 formatted using the largest block size (256k) on a Mac Pro is preferable for full HD (1920×1080 AppleProRes 422 codec 30fps)
Although some of the newest MBP units now have quad core processing and 1 GB of dedicated video RAM so they are capable.

Also, keep in mind that PlaybackPro is a single channel player (one data stream – no crossfades or direct cuts) so it requires less resources. PlaybackPro Plus is a dual channel player to allow for crossfades and direct cuts but the two streams require more resources (more disk bandwidth, more GPU and CPU processing).”

[Craig Leibowitz]

Hi,
Saw your posting here. I’m having major issues with CS4 Media Encoder. It’s so slow. I just rendered a 3 minute piece that took about 7 minutes in Premiere 1.5, but 35 minutes in CS4. Same settings, same computer, same content save a few small edits.
I’m looking for that dialogue box with the XML data box check, but I don’t see it anywhere, either in the settings area nor in the box with videos in cue.
I feel like part of the problem is an .mov file. It seems to speed up a bit after awhile, but not much. I’m now exporting the same video using the wmv9 settings for a 512 download at 360*264 at 25fps, audio at 128kpbs, two passes, and it gave me a 2.5 hour estimated render time. Are you kidding me?!?! Any suggestions would be great!!
I may have to go back to 1.5 to render this damn thing.