MPEG2 encoding hardware
by Kim Rowley
on
Feb 23, 2008 at 8:25:20 am
After production and post, our shop also duplicates an average of 500 or so DVD's of our final projects (NTSC and PAL but without regional code blocks). Our finished Masters are Digibeta PAL and til now we have been encoding (both PAL and NTSC transcodes) via hardware (MediaPress X MPEG encoder card) to create our DVD master disk. It's time to upgrade and I am researching other options and was wondering if anyone with similar workflows has any suggestions for other good quality encoding hardware. I prefer a hardware solution: 1) the quality is better 2) don't want to tie up editing stations with an encoding process. Would need SDI in option.
Any advice of great cards would be appreciated!
Dual 2.7 GHz G5, 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9650, Xserve RAID, AJA IO, 2 20" Cinema Display, FCP Studio 2 (6.02), OS X10.4.11
Re: MPEG2 encoding hardware by Noah Kadner on Feb 24, 2008 at 7:23:09 pm
Not sure what's still out there these days. I'd check with Sonic.com and see what they still have. Personally I use Compressor- it's faster than realtime typically and the quality is great. Plus it can use multiple machines on a network for even faster processing.
Re: MPEG2 encoding hardware by Michael Sacci on Feb 24, 2008 at 7:59:07 pm
Why do you need to upgrade, is the card not working or not meeting your expectations? If that card is working I would just keep the system as a stand alone encoding station and encode the files on a firewire drive that can be moved to your new system.
