How to improve speed from import to burn?

[wyngon]

First post here. Found this site yesterday and know there is more knowledge and experience here than I will ever have. I am converting alot of analog tapes to DVD. I am using A Mac G, 1.8 single drive, 1.5 GB of ram. I convert with a Canopus ADVC100. I import into iMovie and IDVD or Toast6 depending on the lenght. How can I improve the speed of the encoding and rendering process. I know that more ram, a firewired external hard drive and faster burner would help, but is there a product that encodes during import? I have many tapes to do and am hoping to transisiton inot a small business locally so machine time could be a bottleneck? Do you sacrifice quality when you increase speed? Your thoughts are welcome.
Thank you.

[northcat_8]

I am not familiar with a MAC but....

The biggest speed increase thing you can do is upgrade your processor. That is expensive and not really what you are asking.

1.5 GB of RAM is plenty. Increasing your pagefile to 2.5x amount of RAM will give some improvement.

Hard drive speed is also a limitation, make sure your HD's are 7200 rpm drives.

The only other thing you can do is to capture the video in the MPEG-2 format, so that it is ready to go straight to DVD. If you do not need to do much editing to it, then I would certainly suggest this option as a serious time saver.

Basically it is a process that takes as long as it takes. It's never going to be a "quick" process. Computer and software wise, other than a processor, any speed improvements are going to be minimal. It's not going to be a "get 2 more a day done that you were getting before improvement" or anything.

And typically higher speed does mean lesser quality, but that wouldn't apply in this case since you are turning VHS into DVD, there isn't much you can do on the software level to speed up the process.

[miksu]

G5 encodes MPEG2 lot faster than realtime. Even 667MHz G4 does sub realtime.

G5 is actually one of the fastest options you have for MPEG encoding. Dual G5 would be faster... iDVD has good encoding speed and good quality.

I suppose you can't get really much more speed by increasing memory. All G5s have SATA drives, so you don't really gain better disk performance with external FW drive, nor any internal drives, just more drive space.

Only thing you can do to make process really speedier, is to get converter, which converts analog stream directly to mpeg and sends MPEG stream over FW. Then you need only transfer time (realtime) and burning.

Take a look at El Gato-products. Don't have personal experience and there are others, for sure, but they have whole serie of realtime MPEG2-encoders using FW-connection.

Their site is www.elgato.com

[miksu]

Prices (online-shop) are from 129$ (refurb MPEG1-unit) to 369$ (MPEG2-converter).

And as said, you can't get it done faster than realtime. When doing encoding with computer, it's always transfer time+encoding time+burning.

[wyngon]

Thank you for your replies. Here is where my knowledge is really weak.
Miksu you mention Mpeg. I am not sure what format the Canpous is converting too. I went to their website but it really does not say?
Is the El Gato EYE a converter as the Canopus, or does it convert and because it is a TV tuner it is in Mpeg?
Is the Canopus just much more limited than the Eye TV?
Thanks again.

[nufan292]

It encodes video in to DV format. Which then must be converted to mpeg.

[wyngon]

If the Canopus encodes in DV format how do I convert to an Mpeg2 format? I appreciate your help as you can tell I am very new to this.
As Misku has said the G5 handles Mpeg very well, should I have purchased the Formac (as I originally had planned or Elgato eye tv) would they be better suited to do what I am trying to do?

[miksu]

El Gato's tuner has nothing to do with its output format. But it outputs MPEG1 or MPEG2-stream, depending on version and there is no need for time consuming conversion.

As far as I know, Formac outputs DV-stream, so it would do same as your current Canopus. Not time saver. Beside, there are reports that Formac's output quality isn't too fancy...

If you have lot to convert, get El Gato (preferably the version with MPEG2, if you can afford ). Othervise, you can use as well iMovie/Canopus software for import and iDVD for MPEG2 encoding and burning.