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Speed up H.264 encoding

By S Simmons. Filed in Editing  |  
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Elgato Turbo.264 Graphics Accelerator: First Look – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Here’s a look at the new Elgato H.264 encoding accelerator. It plugs into a USB port and offloads some of the H.264 encoding process from your computer’s processor to its on-board processor. Most of the talk on the above linked TUAW post and Elgato’s own site speaks of encoding for the iPod, Apple TV, Playstation Portable and things like that. But I’m sure there’s no reason editors couldn’t use one of the presets that it installs as part of Quicktime to speed up encodes for client approvals. It says the presets can be used by most Quicktime aware applications so I would think you can get the export option out of Final Cut Pro. The FAQ answers a number of questions. It will export through Quicktime Player Pro so you could always export a Quicktime Reference movie and encode it that way. If anyone has one, please report on it’s usage with apps like FCP, Motion, Avid etc.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 6:21 am and is filed under Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

4 comments to “Speed up H.264 encoding”

  1. Comment by ampatspell:
    Friday, June 22nd 2007 at 7:23 am

    The thing to keep in mind is that Elgato can compress video with 800 x 600px max resolution.

  2. Comment by Mark Burton:
    Saturday, June 23rd 2007 at 4:37 am

    Yep, that was a big disappointment for me too. I got this back from Elgato when I first heard about the unit:

    “The Turbo actually encodes in preconfigured profiles. It’s a tiny little encoder, so 800×600 is the maximum of what the hardware can reliably do. The current version does not allow customisation of the profiles or a one time custom export to a format.”

    This does not make it very versatile outside of the iPod, AppleTV + PSP, which I never deliver for! Loading 1024×576 QT’s and getting same size compressed H264′s would have been ideal, as would inputting 1080 or 720 sizes and having this accelerate the process.

    I’ve also been keeping an eye on this company’s products. Currently only SD, but HD models to follow:
    http://www.stealthimaging.com/duoexpress.html

  3. Comment by macsepp:
    Saturday, June 23rd 2007 at 8:29 am

    And that it mostly speeds up older macs. I read somewhere that the speedbump on newer Intel Macs isn’t that great as one might think. The MacPros are alle faster if I remember that right.

  4. Comment by pcdude:
    Tuesday, November 4th 2008 at 12:38 pm

    Are NVidia graphics cards an option for the Intel Macs? When I use the CUDA-enchanced encoder on my $100 8800GT, I get encodes at better than 60fps and can encode at whatever resolution I please. I assume that the technology would scale linearly with graphic card power – a three-way SLI GTX280 ought to be on the order of seven or eight times faster.