video guys...question for you...

[shredmaster]

for those filming in HD and editing to blu-ray, i have a question. what do you export to? i am using premiere pro cs3 for editing along with encore cs3 of course to author the blu-ray disc. i have been exporting to mpeg2 for blu-ray CBR 25. have you used the H.264? it takes SOOOO LONG to encode! like 38 hours to encode 2hours video with a core2 duo 4 gigs ram! have you done it and is it worth it? the mpeg2 blu-ray looks good but i have heard H.264 is better. i used to have a mini HD cam by JVC and i copied the raw m2t files right to blu-ray disc...looks awesome! better than the encoded mpeg2. any help would be great. thanks!

Steve

[jb4674]

Sounds like you need more processing power (core2 quad or xeon quad maybe?) and maybe more ram and 2 or 3 video cards in sli mode. That's just my take on the subject. Generally, video editing needs tons of processing power, along with storage.

Jimmy

[shredmaster]

jb, yeah, espeically for HD. currently i have the core2 duo with 4 gigs, 2TB storage just for video, which is more than enough. 4 video hard drives total. right now i'm looking at building another machine, i7 processor. quad core, 8 cpus hyperthreaded, 6 gigs triple channel ram.... that will take care of that! so, instead of 38 hours it should bring it down to maybe 10 hours just for the encoding. couple friends of mine say it takes them around 12-14 hours at the studios they work at.

anyway, going back to mpeg2 for blu-ray or H.264 for blu-ray...that's the question.

[newbieguitarmaker]

Encoding is usually cpu, I haven't seen too many programs that encode using graphics cards. I wonder if there would be a way to network the work like folding@home and use multiple computers to cut down on time.

Also what camera do you use? I want to have a nice HD cam but really don't want to spend an exorbitant amount since I will be a poor college student.

[ME.]

Do you have your harddrives in a RAID configuration? Or isn't that necessary?

Don't know, just asking.

[Robstar]

It takes a long time to compress two hours worth of video so it sounds like you are on target with your sytem. H.264 is better resolution than regular m-peg but there are diferent flavors of m-peg. I use H.264 to export but remember depending on the software you are using to to burn the blue ray you may get different resolutions.
So check the software settings you are using for the dvd burn, because even if you export with H.264 will convert it back to an mpeg4 format for blueray players.
Also a raid drive set up will speed up your overall system but you need real chip horsepower in order to compress faster. good luck on your project.

[jemsite]

if the resolution is the same your encode to MPEG2 or h.264 would yield pretty much identical results given the equipemtn used... if you have unlimited space on your disc. Which you probably won't . For this reason h.264 is ideal since it allows you to have a longer running time on DVD5 or DVD9 for the same quality... glen

[jb4674]

Try to kill as many services as you can that you don't need to free up the cpu of other tasks.

Jimmy

[shredmaster]

thanks guys. i am not running a raid. that is the way to approach it especially with blu-ray but i haven't seen any benefit compared to those already running a raid. i'm not concerned about speed...just the H.264. i have read that you can get great results with lower resolution, making for more storage space on blu-ray, with H.264, as Glen said. mpeg2 for blu-ray will be limited to roughly 2 hours max.

i was asking to see if the H.264 would yield better on the authoring end as opposed to mpeg2. sounds like no. sounds like i would only use it if i was making a disc over 2 hours. SO MUCH EXPERIMENTATION which i don't mind..... but it takes hours to see the result!

newbieguitar, you can get an awesome HD video cam by Canon for $600 give or take $100. The quality is awesome. For me, I can't show up to a shoot with that mini cam, even though the quality is outstanding!

jb, that is exactly right. the current machine i have in use is for video only. Just the OS and editing software is installed. no office, no nothing. i have a separate machine for that other stuff.

i personally hate mpeg. too much compression! i will tell you, i had the JVC HD7 HD video cam for about 2 weeks. it is a small cam, around $700, GREAT quality! i returned it because it wasn't good in low lighting and i was experimenting. the JVC file format is *.TOD which adobe couldn't read. i didn't want to take the extra step to transcode files that were captured to the camera's hard drive! if that was the case, i will still shoot tape and capture. anyway, i used nero 7 to create a blu-ray and it burned the TOD files to M2t files. the blu-ray it made is OUTSTANDING! that is where i got the idea of getting away from the mpeg2 files, which are compressed way too much. the quality of that smaller cam with M2t files blows away my $3000 Canon cam which was encoded to mpeg2. so i need to find the proper encoding method to get the same result on blu-ray using my Canon. Trying to figure out the encoding when using premiere cs3 / encore cs3.