What compression times are people seeing when compressing their hdv in compressor?

I'm currently saving my 1440 x 1080; 24P footage as a quicktime file (not stand alone) and then bringing it into Compressor and saving it as 16:9 DVD best 120 min.

I'm working on a macbook pro 2.16 with an external 500gb hard drive (firewire 400)

I'm seeing extremely long compression times (4-5hrs to compress 1hr of footage), and I'm wondering if this is normal, or if I need to change something in my setup.

Thanks,
Daniel

Daniel,

I don't edit in HDV but 4-5 hours in Compressor for an hour's worth of content is about right, and I'd consider that "normal", especially considering you're doing all your work on a single external FW drive.

Anyone have any suggestions as to how I can speed things up? (other than buying a new computer?)

thanks again

You're right; the only thing that will dramatically speed up render/encoding time is to use the fastest processor you can afford, lot's of RAM (8gb minimum) and a super-fast external RAID array. But even if you max'd out on all the hardware currently available you're not going to decrease encoding times that significantly - I'd say you'd probably only gain about an hour. That's not a lot of time considering the huge investment you'd have to make.

The only thing that would make for *significantly* lower encode/render times would be to encode your project in a cluster or shared-network environment which is why the pro Apple apps have the "QMaster" software, which creates a distributed-job network whereby multiple machines (G5's MacPros etc) are ganged together for a single purpose, such as encoding or rendering. This of course is massively expensive and is how the major studios work on their projects - mass quantities of CPU's crunching away on multiple projects.

Basically, enjoy what you have; use the time required to encode your project to do other things. Eat, excerise, run errands - take a break! (laughs)

Basically, enjoy what you have; use the time required to encode your project to do other things. Eat, excerise, run errands - take a break! (laughs)

That's always a good excuse for me to get in a round of golf...waiting for encodes. (hehe)

-gb-