compressing to mpeg2

dlang

dlang

Well-known member
Hey guys,
i have a question i've been putting off for a long time. I have a G5 1.8 (single) with 1 and 1/2 gigs of ram. stock video card etc... I recently did a project using DV with a duration of 6 minutes. Using compressor it took me about two hours to compress to mpeg2. I've gotten used to this long process and have just learned to deal with it. Yesterday I went to a friends studio and watched him compress a 5 minute project in about ten minutes on an older PC..probably a 2 gig processor. So my question is for those using a mac G5 close to a 1.8, how long does it usually take to compress a 5 to ten minute DV project to mpeg2? Am I missing something? If i need after market hardware what would it be? Thanks in advance to anyone who can answer may questions.
 
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You don't need any after market hardware to accomplish what you want. However, Compressor is pretty notoriously slow (though it does give pretty good results). If you are willing to pay a little extra though, you could invest in BitVice. I haven't used it myself, but BenB here on the forum swears by it and apparently will deliver much faster compression times than Compressor with comparable results.

However, 2 hours for 5-10 minutes of DV quality footage is way to long. Something odd seems to be happening there. I would think 30 mins tops, even for Compressor, to do that little footage. When you exported out of Final Cut Pro, using Compressor, what were your sequence settings at for the compressor/codec? Even if you shot DV, if you had ramped up your compressor/codec to a high quality one for the final output, then that could increase the compression time quite a bit.

cheers.
 
my average bit rate is 7 and highest is 8. The audio is set to it's highest quality. To my knowledge that's a pretty decent setting. I am very satisfied with the results but still would love to know how to speed it up. Thanks for the reply and the clarity on not needing any new hardware.
 
Never set your bit rate over 6, for a variety of reasons. You won't notice any image quality change between 6 and 8 anyway.

Are you going straight from the Timeline window to Compressor? If so, save it out as a QT movie, NOT self contained, and bring that into Compressor.

BitVice Pro is really nice. Does as nice of a job as Compressor, but much faster. It does one thing and one thing only, MPEG-2 for DVD authoring. It's really nice if you really need the speed.
 
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