MPEG1 encoding speed

BunMan wrote on 5/4/2004, 8:26 AM
I am reletively new to using Vegas, but have been using Studio 8 for quite some time. I do a lot of video encoding to MPEG 1 format due to our customer needs. I just realized from my first couple of test with Vegas 4 that the encoding process is painfully slow compared to Studio 8. I expected it to be a fair amount better and quicker in Vegas, so I was a little disappointed. As an example, I can encode about an hour of video to fill up a CD-R in Studio 8 in about 40 minutes. It took Vegas almost 2 hours to do the same job. My long winded question to all this is, Are there preferences that I need to change to utilize my video card or something to better improve my rendering speed. I searched the forums for a post asking this question but did not find an answer, so I am hoping someone can shed some light on this for me.
Thanks,
Steve

Comments

BunMan wrote on 5/5/2004, 10:34 AM
Anyone? Anyone?
Jsnkc wrote on 5/5/2004, 10:42 AM
In my experieince with rendering to MPEG, if you start with a raw AVI-DV file of your program with no transitions or filters or anything like that it is slightly longer than realtime. Probably an hour long clip would take around 1 hour and 10-15 minutes or so. This will obviously vary depending in your system speed. I get those times using a P4 2.5 with 1GB of DDR Ram.

If you're going directly from your project timeline with transitions and filters and things like that in it it will definately take a lot longer.
BunMan wrote on 5/5/2004, 11:05 AM
Good point. I forgot to mention that I am using a capture device in the field called a FireStore. It let's me capture the video straight to hard drive in a .MOV format. (Or any other format). I would definately use a different capture format if I had the choice, but I don't. I am only doing it this way because my customer wants me to hand him the hard drive so his guy can edit it on his macintosh machine. Odd situation I know. Anyhow, before I hand him the hard drive, I need to take those files and create MPEG-1 for another customer of the same video. I am assuming that the original video being .MOV has something to do with the added time to encode. Does that sound like a decent theory?
Jsnkc wrote on 5/5/2004, 11:23 AM
Sounds like a good theory to me, but I would assume that the drive captures as a Quicktime-DV file which is basically the same as an AVI-DV file, it just had a quicktime wrapper on it. So while it could be the case, I don't really know for sure.