Ways to speed up encoding without purchase

J

johnnyevil

Active member
So I am fairly new to cutting footage in HD. My laptop is more than fast enough to run FCP and work with HD footage, but where the hang up is is in encoding it. Last night, a 5 minute clip too an hour and a half to encode into H.264. I don't know if this is normal or not, but it seemed very slow to me.

Laptop

MBP 15" with Core 2 Duo @ 3.06 GHZ
8GB Ram
512MB nVidia graphics
500GB 7200RPM HD (internal)
Capture Scratch set to FW800 7200RPM WD MyBook

Clip was 5 minutes, shot on Rebel T2i. 1080/30p

I used the EOS Movie Plugin to convert to ProRes LT.

Had two 10 second long After effects titles overlayed. One at the beginning, one at the end. One was brought in as a PNG encoded Quicktime file (I don't know if it's better to use animation or PNG if I want an alpha channel) and the other was ProRes.

Audio was a 24bit WAV from SONY PCM M10, and I have a couple of drum beats at the end that were aif (I got them from Garage band).

I did a very minor color correction on the whole image.

Here is the clip.

It took about 1.5 hours to encode. I've encoded stuff before that processed much faster for similar length clips. Is if the color correction that's increasing the time? It showed me the preview in real time, without rendering in the timeline.

Would it be faster to export the sequence using current settings, and then use something like Handbrake or MPEG Streamclip to compress to H.264? I've already heard the FCP isn't the best program for compressing. (I do not have Compressor, just FCP, Cinema Tools, and Color).

Please do not recommend primarily suggestions that involve new hardware. I am not ready to buy more hardware right now. I want to work with what I have, or with freeware/shareware that I can run on OSX for now. Or just some best practices in addition to what's listed in the stickies up top.

Thanks in advance for any tips.
 
Until you tell us exactly how and what settings you used to compress we can't really help you. Encoding to quicktime h264 definitely has a wide range of settings that greatly impact speed, but you need to tell us step-by-step how you did it. I can definitely offer you some tricks-of-the-trade once you do that.
 
Compression Settings:

Sequence:
Tracks: 2V 4A
29.97fps
1920x1090
ProRes 422(LT)
Square Pixels
Audio 48KHz
32-bit floating point

Sequence has a minor color correction applied to the main track. Second track is about 20 seconds in total length, and is composed of two files generate in AE CS4. One is in Quicktime PNG and the other is ProsRes LT. Two Fade to black transitions. 1 cross fade on the audio.

Export Settings:

I am going to Export, Using Quicktime Conversion and the following settings:

Compression H.264
Quality: High
Key Frame Rate: 24
Frame Reordering: Yes
Encoding mode: Multi-pass
Dimensions 1920x1080

Sound Format: Interger (Little Endian)
Sample Rate: 48.00kHz
Sample Size: 16-bit
Channels: Stereo

I have Prepare for Internet Streaming checked, and fast start selected.
 
Since you're ending up on youtube anyway you don't need to export with some of those functions enabled. Here's what I suggest

fCuiW.png


Adjust the "quality" slider as you see fit. But the setting on my image usually produces pretty darn good results.
For audio, make it AAC 128kpbs.

The file will be big, but the extra upload time will still beat the render time of multi-pass and set key-frames.

Also -- in this particular case using mpeg streamclip is not going to increase your speed much, since your are working off a dual-core system. If you had 4 or 8 cores then mpeg streamclip would present a speed increase against "using quicktime conversion" out of FCP, which doesn't make use of multi-core quite as well as mpeg streamclip.
 
That dropped the render/encoding time to less than 30 minutes. Thank you very much. That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. This will hold me over till I decide what my new machine should be. It also produced a file about half the size from what I was getting from my initial settings.
 
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