HMC 151 and iMac G5
- Thread starter redone
- Start date
Thomas Lew
Well-known member
I feel as though you would have a very hard time with it.. I would wait to uprade your mac first before purchasing an hmc.
Also the hmc does not have an option to shoot sd
Also the hmc does not have an option to shoot sd
Justyn
Veteran
Without having an intel box, you'll be forced to use toast and or Voltaic and those are so so painfully slow. Your box which is also slower than mine, would be a nightmare. On my dual 2.0 G5 tower with 4 gigs of RAM.. it's excruiatingly slow to transcode. I'd say like 3x real time or something like that. Maybe not quite that bad...
Plus you'd be really bogging down the system when cutting. I don't think you'd be able to scrub at all and the 1080 stuff would really kill your graphics card.
Plus you'd be really bogging down the system when cutting. I don't think you'd be able to scrub at all and the 1080 stuff would really kill your graphics card.
I have the HMC-152 EN (PAL region, non-switchable) and a Quad G5 (4 x 2.66GHz) plus 4G Ram. Transcoding is about 30–40% real time, even with all that horsepower.
The HMC-152 will not produce SD footage; unlike the 170 and the 200, it cannot downconvert from HD to SD in-camera, as far as I know. I wish it could, for some jobs.
I strongly agree with Justyn, above: upgrade your machine as soon as you can. hth, KL
The HMC-152 will not produce SD footage; unlike the 170 and the 200, it cannot downconvert from HD to SD in-camera, as far as I know. I wish it could, for some jobs.
I strongly agree with Justyn, above: upgrade your machine as soon as you can. hth, KL
By the way, the existing AVC-transcoders are single-threaded, this means they won't profit from multiple cores or CPUs. And they won't use the GPU of your GFX card either.
Let's hope things change with Snow Leopard and OpenCL.
pailes, are you sure about this? If you look at the times posted by Justyn, above (2.0GHz vs, my 2.66GHz) that does not seem accurate.
My processor speed is only ~25% faster, yet my clips transcode 8–9 times faster—which only makes sense if all my processors are being used. What is your source for this claim? Just curious; transcode speed was the very first thing I checked and it has remained constant (~30–40% real time over many hours of footage, now). Cheers, kl
My processor speed is only ~25% faster, yet my clips transcode 8–9 times faster—which only makes sense if all my processors are being used. What is your source for this claim? Just curious; transcode speed was the very first thing I checked and it has remained constant (~30–40% real time over many hours of footage, now). Cheers, kl
Okay thinking about it again I feel like I should not have made this claim
rogar-Dum(DBG):Let's put it this way:
First of all, the AVC stream has to be encoded in slices so that multiple threads can decode them. If it's not sliced you won't gain anything by adding more cores to it (click this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law for explanation)
From what they say in my company it seems that existing AVC decoders are only slowly migrating to multithreaded decoding. It probably depends on which transcoder you are actually using. But my guess is that current transcoders are not yet using the full potential of a CPU with multiple cores. I'd love to hear different opinions about this. I might be wrong.
But hey, why not simply open up the acivity monitor and watch the CPU usage while the encoder is running. I will do this when I get home.
(for those interested how to do that: http://diglloyd.com/diglloyd/free/MultiCore/index.html)
Last edited:
Justyn
Veteran
Pailes is right. FCP does use all the processors and all the cores. My buddy who has a 4 core macpro is able to transcode at about .80x real time. It's faster than real time so that's pretty good.
Getting a faster INTEL box is highly recommended. You can pick up an older Mac Pro or a refurb for pretty cheap. I have seen them for 1500 as a refurb.
Getting a faster INTEL box is highly recommended. You can pick up an older Mac Pro or a refurb for pretty cheap. I have seen them for 1500 as a refurb.