First a little background of what I have:

I have optibase movie maker plus cards. (4)
I take VCR and MiniDV tapes and convert to mpeg1.
These videos are compressed pretty high (1 1/2-2 hours per 750megs)
4 CPU's (p2-266 (x2) and p4-1.5ghz (x2)


Now for the questions

1. Has anyone used these cards and know if I can show real time output of what is being encoded on a computer monitor? (so I can see color, sound level's, vert/hort placements, etc)

2. Is there any possible way to put more than one card into one computer? and have them encode at the same time? I know that the optibase composer software will not allow more than one instance of itself running at once. I would like to build a machine that I can run all 4 from at a time.

3. If 2 is possible what speed machine machine would u recommend? RAM?

4. If 2 is possible of course I am going to need multiple hard drives, anyone have any suggestions on what raid I should buy (non-scsii if possible).


I some times get up to 120 hours of video that has to be encoded in a weeks time. Keeping up with 4 cpu's/VCR's/dv decks is a big hassle, main hassle being quality control, with no realtime output I either have to do a test run or just let the whole video encode before I know if its all set right. The videos I get are all done by different people, different cams, different lighting, different mic's, etc, etc.

any ideas?