Fastest way to get 4/3 compressed MPEG 2 file from HD video?

I've recently started doing legal video and am shooting with an HD camera (Panasonic HMC150 3 chip). Of course, most clients want the final output to be 4/3 video. To get there, I am taking the HD footage and bringing it into a 4/3 timeline in FCP 7.03. This takes about 4 hours to render 2 hours of video before I can export it with Compressor to an MPEG2 file, which takes another couple of hours to compress.

This seems to be a long time to end up with a fairly low quality file (I am working on a Mac Pro with 2X2.4 Quadcore Intel Xenon with 8GB of memory). Is there a faster way to do this? Any help would be appreciated!

Yes.

First, set up Qmaster.

[www.dellanave.com]

Follow everything except that because you don't have a SAN, you don't need to set up QAdmin, so you can check "Quick Cluster with services" instead. And set instances to the total number of cores minus one, so if you have 2x Quad cores with hyper threading, you have 8 cores x2, so set it to 14 or 15. Rule of thumb is to provide each core with 2 GBs of RAM, so, ideally fit your machine with 32 gigs of RAM, or set it to 4 or 6 instances since you don't have that much RAM.

Then export a reference QT movie with "DVD Studio Pro markers" (this will add compression flags to cut points), and if it doesn't need much rendering this process should be much much faster than what you are doing, then do all that you are doing in Compressor.

Here's how to set up Compressor.

1. Set the flag to 4:3. I'm in PAL land, so your setting should default to NTSC based on your source format.




2. Set it to 1 pass CBR. And Motion Quality to "Good". This will result in faster encoding, sacrificing quality. Click on the Gear icon next to bit rate for Compressor to automatically determine the optimum bit rate for your video.



3. Go to the Geometry tab. If you want it letterboxed (black bars on top and bottom), click on "16:9" under padding.



OR

if you need it center cropped (with the sides cropped out), click on 4:3 under "crop to".




When you submit to queue, you will choose the cluster that you created as according to the link I mentioned.

If you want to speed things up even more, go to Frame Controls tab and turn off frame controls. The trade off is speed for quality.



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If you want to bypass log and transfer for the ingest, I would suggest going the Premiere route. For downscaling, the GPU can take care of it if you have a compatible graphics card. The next Premiere will be more flexible with the graphics cards, and all you need is an AMD or Nvidia graphics card with more than 1GB of VRAM. Nvidia will be preferable because if you need to do blurring to protect identities, that's also GPU accelerated.



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