OT: new encoder from Thompson Grass Valley

rs170a wrote on 1/21/2009, 12:56 PM

It's of no interest to me at this time but I thought others might want to check it out.

Mike

FIRECODER Blu is an H.264/MPEG-2 compatible hardware transcoder board which provides high speed transcoding of video files for use in Blu-ray authoring.

FIRECODER Blu may also be used to transcode between H.264 and MPEG-2 files. It supports up and down conversion of SD and HD sources and output may be written directly to Blu-ray disc or stored as a file. Provides up to 4-5x faster than real-time encoding.

FIRECODER Blu is a PCI Express x1 encoder card, with included FIRECODER WRITER software application.

FIRECODER Blu is priced at $599 US (excluding taxes)

Comments

ushere wrote on 1/21/2009, 10:45 PM

hi mike,

keeping warm i hope - it was sweltering here till yesterday, then it bucketed down....

have to say i'm rather attached to procoder 3.

true, i rarely use it nowadays, but it did / does very nice encoding, and batch encoding to different formats at the same time. now that i'd like in vegas.....

leslie

farss wrote on 1/21/2009, 10:55 PM

"and batch encoding to different formats at the same time. now that i'd like in vegas....."

The Multirenderer in Peachrock's Veggie Toolkit will give you exactly that.

Bob.

John_Cline wrote on 1/21/2009, 11:18 PM

Now that I think of it, if they would incorporate CUDA GPU acceleration technology into Procoder, I'd marry it. OK, maybe not marry it, but probably have an exclusive, committed relationship.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 1/21/2009, 11:56 PM

" 'and batch encoding to different formats at the same time. now that i'd like in vegas.....'

The Multirenderer in Peachrock's Veggie Toolkit will give you exactly that.

Bob."

I just use Ultimate S Pro from VASST and will make multiple projects of various promo's, and then go to the renderer tab, tell it to render all the projects, and set it to my for web (couple different bit rates), DVD, and separate AC3 audio, and walk away. I love that I don't have to mess repeating for each project, but I can just have it load all of them in a string.

I'd think that batch encoding the same material to several different formats simultaneously would end up slowing things down, because resources are only available in one place, and if you have to read from the same drive for 3 different tasks from the same files even, you've got potential slowdowns, but I could be wrong.

Dave

farss wrote on 1/22/2009, 12:16 AM

"but I could be wrong."

You are but none of the solutions mentioned really address the issue. There's two steps in the process.

1) Decode all the source frames, apply FXs, composite etc.

2) Encode to the target codec.

Even though the multirender automates all this Vegas will still have to repeat steps 1) and 2) for each pass. On a complex project that takes say 10 hours to render, 9 hours of that might be while Vegas does step 1) and one hour for step 2).

If you need 4 different outputs or resolutions the savings could be as much as 27 hours!

However you can improve things anyway just using Vegas by first rendering to an intermediate codec of low loss like the Sony YUV codec and then encoding that to whatever codecs / resolutions you need. This would significantly speed things up although you'll need more disk space.

Bob.

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 1/22/2009, 12:22 AM

I think I'm misunderstanding what the multirenderer is then. As I understand it, it's a tool that opens several instances of vegas and has them rendering all at one time, from the same files?

Seems to me that disk bandwith has to come into play at some point if that's the case.

Dave

farss wrote on 1/22/2009, 12:44 AM

"As I understand it, it's a tool that opens several instances of vegas and has them rendering all at one time, from the same files?"

Not the Multirenderer from Peachrock.
It's more like a scheduler. It stores your render requests in a small database and processes them one at a time, even keeps a log file.
When we do bulk jobs like say all the grand final matches from one weekend it is a god send. I just set it up to render each project to mpeg-2 and ac3 and let it run over night. Total time to complete rendering 10 projects is the same however it saves you having to be there to kick off the renders.
If you do a lot of renders I'd suggest you download the fully featured time limited trial.

Bob.