Will elgato turbo.264 accelerate fcp log and transfer ?

[vocare]

The log and transfer will take a while on fcp on mac.
Will elgato turbo.264 accelerate fcp log and transfer for editing ?

[JonathanS]

I don't believe so. H.264 is a highly asymmetric codec; it's much more costly, computationally, to compress it than decompress it. So the Turbo.264 HD provides hardware acceleration for outputting H.264 files, but I don't believe it's even in the loop for reading/decoding them.

Depending on your hardware, Log & Transfer/transcode isn't horribly time-consuming. On a Mac Pro it's about as quick as copying data off the SDHC card, and the Mac remains usable while it's running. Indeed, you can continue to edit in Final Cut while Log & Transfer runs in the background.

[elias neris]

you can dump the files into the elgato app and have to convert to h264 file.
But, that still wont do any good if you are editing in FCP. I bought it to export to h264 HD for blu ray but the quality from the elgato is lacking when you export h264 for SD it looks great but for HD I wouldn't recommend it I returned mine.

[David Saraceno]

No, it doesn't have anything to do with the log and transfer ingest.

[vocare]

you can dump the files into the elgato app and have to convert to h264 file.
But, that still wont do any good if you are editing in FCP. I bought it to export to h264 HD for blu ray but the quality from the elgato is lacking when you export h264 for SD it looks great but for HD I wouldn't recommend it I returned mine.

Thanks for sharing. dont think that i will get it . rather invest on more ram for system.

[bluesgeek]

you can dump the files into the elgato app and have to convert to h264 file.
But, that still wont do any good if you are editing in FCP. I bought it to export to h264 HD for blu ray but the quality from the elgato is lacking when you export h264 for SD it looks great but for HD I wouldn't recommend it I returned mine.

I'm interested in this item because I am using a 2.16 MacBook and it lose a lot of time converting for H.264. I'm intrigued by the potential to take a load off the CPU and save time. Can you please expound a bit on what seems lacking in HD conversion? Thanks.

[elias neris]

There was some small pixelation, color aberration (noise) and scene changes with movement such as a slow pan was choppy. The same video encoded with quicktime conversion or compressor did not produce the for-mentioned. I used ElGato preset as well as some custom settings with higher bitrate even the max of 20Megs with the latest firmware. This is HD settings on the Turbo H264 HD.

The SD videos the elGato created were great but if you plan to use it for HD I wouldn't recommend it. Hopefully, Elgato will fix this issues in a future firmware update. I really liked the speed but I need to quality to be as good as what FCP gives me.

[bluesgeek]

Yes, I find the best quality H.264 from the FCP roundtripped to Compressor 2-pass, but rarely have time to tie up FCP while that is processing. So, I usually export FHD from FCP and run Compressor on the side. Sometimes I export H.264 QT Conversion from FCP, but I'm not sure which of these last 2 processes are giving me the best result.

Thanks for the advice. Just for giggles, how fast does elGato run compared to a FCP conversion? Thanks again.