Slow Conversion with a Dual Athlon System...What gives?

[Shannafey]

We just put together a dual processor Athlon 1.8 system with 1gig of RAM to do 3D animation and also to work with our DPS Perception Recorder capture card, using an external 10,000 rpm scsi drive for storage and tmpgenc to encode videos for CD distribution. It takes us an hour to render a 10 minute 320x240 mpeg-1 video using the .avi created by the Perception board, and using a cbr of 1150 in tmpgenc.
What are we doing wrong!!??

[sean madison]

i have never heard of a dual 1.8 ghz.

i have heard of the mp1800 and 1900 but the 1800 is only 1.53 ghz so the 1900 has got to be like 1.6

anyways, things to slow it down-

soften block noise, noise reduction filter, res of 720x480, fps over 29.97, motion search precision- high or highest, 2 pass vbr, ghost reduction

i think thats it

[aruprc16]

Very strange as it takes roughly six hours to convert a 2.5 hour DVD into SVCD with VBR and high quality settings on my ancient dual P-III 850. Your dream system should be flying through.

[Spicuzza]

Shannafey,

Before posting I captured a 10 minute TV clip at 320 x 240, uncompressed AVI, then encoded that to MPEG 1 320 x 240 @ 1150 kbps using Ulead VideoStudio 6.0.

I have a 1.33 ghz Athlon and the encoding time was 5 minutes 50 seconds.

If it's taking you an hour to render/encode a 10 minute clip I would have to conclude that you have a serious problem with your computer configuration.

One question....You say "using an external 10,000 rpm scsi drive"??!!
What do you mean? How is the scsi drive connected to the motherboard?

"External" to me brings to mind a usb, serial or parallel port type connection. If that is the case..... that is the problem.

Hope this helps.

Gary Spicuzza
cic7@juno.com

[psycaz]

In Tmpgenc, under Option, Environmental setting. click the cpu tab. Do you have the box for Use multithread checked.
This should allow you to set it up to tak advantage of the dual cpu's. My apologies if you have done this, but I wasn't sure.
You may want to post what your settings are for Tmpgenc and what version so others may be able to help in that regard.

[Shannafey]

psycaz, yes I did have multithread selected, but thanks for asking. spicuzza, I am beginning to think that the external drive is the problem, but it is a scsi drive, not parallel or usb. scsi is the fastest connection you can get. Maybe it's due to the fact that the DPS card requires it's own hard drive and uses a proprietary codec. It is frustrating, having such a fast system, but not getting the speed.

[homerpez]

This may sound odd, BUT...

I doubt whether, in the "real" world, External SCSI is in fact the fastest type of drive.

While SCSI is, theoretically, faster, I have found that External SCSI operates no faster than ATA-66 or 100 drives, and usually slower.

Why? Who knows.

At work, I'm on a Dual-P4 Server, 1 Gig RAM, 2 SCSI hard drives which are internal. On this same machine, there is an Ultra-SCSI External (something-something, the wide plug with more contacts), which runs SLOWER than the internal ones. It's more comparable to a standard ATA-33 or 66 IDE drive.

I also have another external drive that I use to take work home on, this is also SCSI but the "slower" type. Still, it's supposed to have the same bandwidth as normal SCSI, which on paper is faster than IDE. Well, I have to copy my work off that drive onto my IDE-66, because I/O off that drive is unbearable.

Try an internal configuration, or even just normal ATA-100 IDE drives, see what happens.