How to Shrink your video twice as fast !

[SingSing]

If you have two hard drives, you should source from one, and shrink to the other.

When I shrink video on a PC with a single 300GB drive, it takes about 18 minutes, but when I shrink video from a PC with two 200 GB drives ( source from C: and output to D: ), it takes about 10 minutes.

You already figured it out, the drive head is swinging between two places in that 300GB drive and thus take twice as long.

[Zen of Encoding]

If you have two hard drives, you should source from one, and shrink to the other.

When I shrink video on a PC with a single 300GB drive, it takes about 18 minutes, but when I shrink video from a PC with two 200 GB drives ( source from C: and output to D: ), it takes about 10 minutes.

You already figured it out, the drive head swings between two places in that 300GB drive and thus take twice as long.

Good information, but how did you get the source stream into your C: drive?
How long did the initial input take?

Is there any time savings in initially ripping the video to one drive, and then
shrinking the video with a different hard drive as the target, over just
ripping and shrinking simultaneously when one first inputs the video to the computer?

Or am I missing something?

[jimmalenko]

I'm happy for the OP's "discovery", but I think you'll find that the speed increase is actually to do with the utilisation of the IDE channels in this case. Similar speed increases can be seen by having a DVD-ROM on a different IDE channel to your hard drive.

If your source and destination folders are on the same drive, you can only do one operation down the same IDE channel at a time - read or write. So the same drive needs to read some info into RAM, feed the processor and then write back to the hard drive. However seperate IDE channels mean one can be constantly reading whilst the other is constantly writing. Hence the speed increase.

[SingSing]

1. For movie, I DVDshrink a movie without compression to a harddisk first. So, I can use VOBblank or MenuShrink to get rip of the warning, and unwanted material, then shrink to DVD5.

2. For digital cam, I transfer miniDV with a DVD recorder at XP, then author, and compile into a folder, then use DVD shrink to shrink it down to DVD5.

3. To get good video quality, I use DVDshrink with deep analysis. The long and intensive processing can run at max speed, if I remember to do it on a PC with two ATA133 harddisk, instead of the PC with single hard disk.

[SingSing]

I'm happy for the OP's "discovery", but I think you'll find that the speed increase is actually to do with the utilisation of the IDE channels in this case. Similar speed increases can be seen by having a DVD-ROM on a different IDE channel to your hard drive.

The PC has both hard disks on the same IDE channel, so the source drive head is sequentially stepping thru the source, ad the output drive do the same thing. It is very efficient because the disk head is not trashing around the two spots as in single drive.

[hech54]

It all depends on which drive is on which channel...period. Everyone knows that deep analysis is faster from the data on the hard drive vs. from the DVD in the optical drive.
Nothing new....moving on.