Mathieu Ghekiere
January 2nd, 2012, 06:36 PM
Hey All,
at our work we have an older 2.66 Quad Core Mac Pro and a 3.0 8 core, older one too.
We have a big project coming up at the third week of january (so it's pretty urgent) where we are gonna need good enough processing power to have hours and hours of XDCAM footage to render to H264 (720p and/or 480p) at the end of every day.
Because our older Mac Pro's, even with clusters in Compressors, aren't always as reliable or fast enough, we bought a Matrox MXO2 last year to help us do such things. The Matrox has helped us enough, but for this project we would need more processing power.
We are doubting between a second Matrox MXO 2 or a new 12 Core Mac Pro, which costs substantially more, but could be used for a lot of other things too (such as replacing some of our older Mac Pro's).
Now, we should first know how fast we can have a reference for rendering XDCAM footage to 720p or 480p H264 with the clusters and all threads turned on.
There is not one Apple reseller in Belgium that I found that had a 12 core, and nobody wanted to order one to test it for us. Ordering one could take up to 3 weeks, so we have to decide now.
We are leaning towards a 12 core because we also ordered 2 Scarlets and working with RED footage will welcome a 12 core, but we are nothing with it if it is too slow at rendering H264 on that project.
I read one test of someone online that his older Quad Core (the same as our quad core) rendered his film in 17 minutes, and the new 12 core MP in 3 minutes (!!!), both with clusters set up to their maximum.
This is very good news, but could someone confirm me how rendering times are?
Can we expect faster than real time, significant faster than real time, real time, more than real time, ...?
I don't know if this is too much to ask, but if someone has some XDCAM footage (roughtly a 30 minute file?) and could for instance test a render to the H264 LAN preset and/or the Youtube Sharing preset (a very good 720p preset but one that I know takes a LOT of rendering time) that you could render and give us some heads up, it would be great, as we have to decide pretty urgently.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated,
thanks,
at our work we have an older 2.66 Quad Core Mac Pro and a 3.0 8 core, older one too.
We have a big project coming up at the third week of january (so it's pretty urgent) where we are gonna need good enough processing power to have hours and hours of XDCAM footage to render to H264 (720p and/or 480p) at the end of every day.
Because our older Mac Pro's, even with clusters in Compressors, aren't always as reliable or fast enough, we bought a Matrox MXO2 last year to help us do such things. The Matrox has helped us enough, but for this project we would need more processing power.
We are doubting between a second Matrox MXO 2 or a new 12 Core Mac Pro, which costs substantially more, but could be used for a lot of other things too (such as replacing some of our older Mac Pro's).
Now, we should first know how fast we can have a reference for rendering XDCAM footage to 720p or 480p H264 with the clusters and all threads turned on.
There is not one Apple reseller in Belgium that I found that had a 12 core, and nobody wanted to order one to test it for us. Ordering one could take up to 3 weeks, so we have to decide now.
We are leaning towards a 12 core because we also ordered 2 Scarlets and working with RED footage will welcome a 12 core, but we are nothing with it if it is too slow at rendering H264 on that project.
I read one test of someone online that his older Quad Core (the same as our quad core) rendered his film in 17 minutes, and the new 12 core MP in 3 minutes (!!!), both with clusters set up to their maximum.
This is very good news, but could someone confirm me how rendering times are?
Can we expect faster than real time, significant faster than real time, real time, more than real time, ...?
I don't know if this is too much to ask, but if someone has some XDCAM footage (roughtly a 30 minute file?) and could for instance test a render to the H264 LAN preset and/or the Youtube Sharing preset (a very good 720p preset but one that I know takes a LOT of rendering time) that you could render and give us some heads up, it would be great, as we have to decide pretty urgently.
Any help or advice is greatly appreciated,
thanks,