Use Multiple Computers

[ZoNE97]

Is there a way that I can harness the power of multiple computers to SPEED up the conversion video process. I have some 4 gig videos I want compressed down to say 700-800 meg, and it takes like 12 hours per video? I have several computers that I could split the task up on, I just need to know if there is software out there that can do it. And no, I don't want to do one per machine. Come on.. I want to do one video per 6 machines and get it done in minutes not hours.

Thanks.

[poisondeathray]

Compress to what kind of video? I'm going to assume h.264 because it shouldn't take 12hours for MPEG2 or xvid, for example (unless your PC is very old)

Search for x264farm on Doom9 there is a 1pass and 2pass variant. The problem is it hasn't been updated in a while and uses an older x264.exe

Vegas Pro also allows you to render with multiple PC's but it doesn't scale very well

[jagabo]

Since you appear to have more than one video to convert the simplest solution is to just convert different videos on different computers.

[jameshgross]

PC Clustering SW is available try www.pccluster.org
or google clustering software.

[greymalkin]

I also don't see why you wouldn't encode different video's on different computers..using a cluster or render farm you are going to lose efficiency to the overhead of keeping up with what each computer is doing.

[minidv2dvd]

the tests i ran with vegas networked rendering were enough to never use it again. much slower than just running single encodes on different machines and not always reliable. some output videos were corrupt. i rearranged my office so i can reach several comps by turning my chair.

[edDV]

the tests i ran with vegas networked rendering were enough to never use it again. much slower than just running single encodes on different machines and not always reliable. some output videos were corrupt. i rearranged my office so i can reach several comps by turning my chair.

The vegas "cluster" works fairly well for complex effects rendering but less well for encoding.

[greymalkin]

you just need to wait for the GPU rendering to mature and get you an OCTO-SLI setup

[Nelson37]

The very few test results of distributed encoding software I have seen strongly indicate that it just doesn't work very well.

Far more efficient to distribute the workload by just encoding seperate files on seperate PC's.

Getting it done in minutes is just not going to happen, but 6 files on 6 Pc's in 12 hours is 120 minutes per file. Best available at the present time.