Badaboom is a very fast and inexpensive way to encode h.264, however it does not work with the new nVidia 400 and 500 series GPUs. They posted this last April and have said nothing more since:

http://badaboomit.com/node/507

It also won't accept .AVI files (like uncompressed or Lagarith), so you will need to render to an intermediate MPEG2 or AVC file first which potentially compromises ultimate quality.

So let me understand this (and I may not), so, please, excuse my ignorance.

Badaboom encodes video for Vimeo, for example, and once the video is up loaded to Viemo there is no need for re-encoding. Is that correct?

The real advantage is if you are working with HDV. You put the HDV footage on a Vegas timeline and it previews beautifully. You edit and smart-render the HDV footage incredibly quickly and losslessly into an HDV master. You burn this file onto a Blu-ray disk without recompressing using TMPGEnc Authoring Works or Adobe Encore. Now you want to put the video on Youtube or Vimeo, so you load it into nVidia Badaboom and convert it into .h264 at very high quality in a fraction of the time of a Vegas render, and because the work is mostly being done by the GPU, you can use your computer for other things during the conversion.

I admit, not everyone is going to want to work this way, but for me at least, this is a pretty amazing workflow. I do mostly non-profit and church related video and so I am not making huge amounts of money. What this lets me do is turn out a product quickly and painlessly that is still (IMHO at least) of spectacular quality. I am pretty amazed at how well this is working!

>So let me understand this (and I may not), so, please, excuse my ignorance.

No that is not correct. Vimeo is still going to re-code your video. The advantage is that Badaboom will render the file you need to upload in a fraction of the time and with almost no CPU load during the conversion.

The disadvantage is that Badaboom won't work from a Cineform or uncompressed master. I really only see it fitting into the workflow of those of us who work with HDV mpeg2 and use smart-rendering. But, for those of us who do work that way, this is pretty freakin' cool! :-)

I have in the past been mastering to Cineform in order to eke out that last little bit of quality. I believe that I am going to stop doing that though. With my HVR-Z7, I can shoot 30p progressive. This camera has picture profiles much like those on the EX1 and EX3 that let you tweak the color as it is shot. Between the picture profiles, careful white balancing, and attention to exposure, I can get footage that looks really good as it is shot. I can smart-render this into a great looking master. By putting this un-recoded file on Blu-ray, I can get an image that looks pristine. The parts that aren't smart-rendered still look very good: really no worse than if I mastered to Cineform and then re-rendered to some other compressed delivery format. By converting this same HDV master into h264 with Badaboom I can put the same video online with barely any rendering time. This workflow saves a generation for Blu-ray but adds an extra generation for Vimeo and Youtube. Fortunately, the Blu-ray version is the one that people see on the bigger screen and watch more critically. What this workflow does for me is save huge amounts of both hard disk space and rendering time. For the next year or so at least, I believe I have found a new workflow!

"Badaboom is a very fast and inexpensive way to encode h.264, however it does not work with the new nVidia 400 and 500 series GPUs."

Doesn't seem to work with my GTX 275 or 285 either (both cuda enabled)

Laurence, do you know which H.264 codec Badaboom has under the hood? Have you had any chance to compare its output against x264 or the 2 codecs in Vegas?