Other likes and dislikes

by on November 1, 2006

I hate link-love begging icons too.
I like Mike.
I hate bombs.
I like when Mark Lucovsky of Google leaves me comments.
I hate waiting for Final Cut Express HD to save my videos into H.264 (more than two hours for a 40-minute video, and that’s on a decked out MacPro!)

  • I was a fan of 3vix as well, but unfortunately it doesn't work on Intel Macs and it doesn't look like there is a plan to support them. That's a real bummer because it did save me a lot of time AND looked damn good in the process. Back to h.264 and long wait times for me.
  • Christopher Coulter
    2 pass and wait...just a fact of life, tried all sorts of tricks, and at the end, more hours is good trade off for better product. Tapeless is the one bottleneck people can fix however, outside of render network farming, that is. Death to tape capture...

    Been doing Vegas 7b for DVD Arch 4 MPEG 2ified for a near full DVD, 3-4 hours. 3ivx never granted me acceptable quality, rmvb/divx/xvid bit better but then the codec issues.
  • I have 4Gigs of RAM and fast hard drives. So not sure.
  • Hopefully the Quad core chips will be here soon for you. The Dual Quads instead of Dual Duals should hopefully cut that encode time close to in half. Although I would be curious to see what is your bottleneck, proc, mem or disk. On some of my encodes the disk seems to be my limiting factor.
  • ET
    I use Sony Vegas for HD video and its probably slower!! HD video + H.264 = PAIN!!! I cant do anything else on the system while its rendering.
  • Dan
    For our video blog Berks.TV we recently switched to 3ivx (http://www.3ivx.com/) after getting sick of the wait times for H.264. Rocketboom used (maybe still uses) 3ivx and we've been pretty happy with the quality at 400x225, coming originally from HDV and using FCE. Even using custom settings, H.264 was taking way too long on a G5 Quad with 2.5 GB RAM. The image lacks some of the razor-sharp clarity possible with H.264, but processing time and file size are drastically reduced. Maybe you've already tried 3ivx but I thought I would mention it anyway.
  • Jeff: hmmm, I tried one pass and it noticeably isn't as good a quality.
  • I don't know if you can do it in Express, but in Compressor in the Final Cut Pro suite, I've found that creating your own H.264 settings you'll get there faster. Two-pass is never necessary for talking heads especially, but the default (like "export to iPod") does two passes.
  • You like my comments? Wow, I'm honored. I'm kind of new to this whole blogging thing, BUT bloggers are a very important customer to me and blogging is the best way to communicate with them.

    I wanted to also share this blog:

    http://googleajaxsearchapi.blogspot.com/

    This is one way we communicate ideas/features in the search api. Check out the search box in the upper right. Search for somethign simple like AJAX and note the tabs across the top. "This Blog" is a site restricted blog search over the current blog. "Google Blogs" is a Custom Search Engine search over all Google Blogs. Then Web, Blog, and News search are the obvious.
  • H.264 is gorgeous to look at, but dear lord, it will make you cry waiting on the encode.

    having said that, you should check the QuickTime-users archives, they may be of use: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/quickti...

    I don't know if it handles FCE, but this one: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/pro-app... is for content providers as well as devs, so it could be useful too.
  • Chris, isn't that obvious? ;-)
  • Yes, but could you tell us how you feel about TechMeme?
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