[Gabriele Sartori]

Wait a moment, I never said that I don’t work with identical parameters. I do work with the closest possible parameters, I do check the visual output and Handbrake is faster, pretty much linearly scaling with the number of cores used. I don’t find this to be strange both X264 and H264 are very mature, very optimized coded. They are pretty much equivalent on one core under all the measurable aspects. The difference is that X264 can use more cores and this means that is a very well crafted product.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Take the highest possible clock and probably you have the most bangs for the bucks. Consider also the support for Quicksync that is not available (yet) on Xeon CPUs.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

I built many Hackintosh for fun but I would never do a serious job on them. All it takes is a driver and you can be without machine for days

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

must make sure that all the parameters are identical, not easy task. With identical visual quality Handbrake is faster to me and it is linearly faster with the number of cores used. Your CPU utilization with Compressor is pretty good though, it seems better than mine even if I factor in that you are on 8 cores and I’m on 12.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

I previously discussed somewhere in this thread that GPU gave great expectations but never delivered up to those expectations (when used for encoding H264). I did that myself for professional reasons when I used to be the CTO of a company doing remote desktop computing. What is described in the video is mostly this aspect and the super-parallelism of GPUs. about CPUs has been proved over and over that using a decent number of cores for H264 encoding is possible. I’m not thinking about using cores for the sake of it , I hope I was clear. I was talking about using more cores for a faster speed like actually Apple does with some of their codecs that are also GOP based. The reality here is that Apple H264 is not a great codec in terms of CPUs parallelism. X264 (used in HandBrake) is much better and can compress equivalent quality in a fraction of the time due to the higher CPU (not GPU) parallelism. All my tests are related to the Apple products, Intentionally I don’t do Premiere because otherwise I would introduce other unknown variables. For what is concerning HW encoding in imac, it’s possible that a visual inspection of the output is not significantly different but under the mathematical point of view it’s different. Single pass is not 2 pass. In any case I would be happy to do this in HW but since I’ve a 12 core Mac Pro I’d like to use the resources of my expensive HW that Apple sold me as the most poferful HW they do. I will just continue to use HandBrake, it works, it’s good, it’s fast and uses X264 inside, a very good codec. Thank you for your help.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Thank You Andreas, I see, no easy solution. If you have any codec you can suggest it would be great. Thanks

Gabriele

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Thanks, it seems that we have the same issue then due to the Apple Codec. I find very strange to see Apple unable to produce a new Codec that takes advantage of their best HW. Incredible.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

This is good news Helge Tjelta, any suggestions? I usually convert from Apple Prores 4:2:2 into H264 but I can use other input formats if it helps. Any high level setting (i.e. input codec – output codec) that you can recommend. I do prefer H264 in MP4 container but I could live with H264 in MOV container. Thanks!

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

You are saying a number of things that are correct but as you said Compressor is more tunable and it is integrated I’d like to use it but I can’t wait hours to compress, particularly now on 4K, I get impatient. So far I’m using Handbrake that is indeed enough for me but I hate to have an extra app. Handbrake does a decent job also with H265 BTW but for compatibility reasons, I output H264 for now. I came here assuming that some Compressor expert with experience on a 12 core machine can give me a magic solution but I understand it is a corner case not the mainstream utilization. I just don’t understand why Apple doesn’t support well their own high-end HW especially now with a new iMAC Pro with 18 core on the horizon. That machine runs only at 2.4GHZ but it would kill if all the cores can be used. Thanks for all the good intentions though.

Gabriele – California

[Gabriele Sartori]

Obviously I was talking about H264. This is the only format I’m interested in because it’s so heavy on the system.

Gabriele – California