Thanks to all the upsets this weekend, my rankings have been shuffled a bit. LSU continues to be a dominant #1. Virginia Tech climbs to #13 which is pretty amazing since they still have no offense.
I’m publishing my college rankings a week early this season. No surprises. LSU and Oklahoma are at the top. My Hokies are #17 but I predict they will fall over the next three weeks. Why? They face UNC, Clemson, and Duke in their next three games. UNC and Duke will kill their strenght of schedule and Clemson will probably just kill them.
If Tech doesn’t find an offense soon, its going to be a long season.
One of my hobbies is converting Virginia Tech football games from video to digital. I’m using Final Cut Studio to do the job. I export my video’s to MPEG-4 H.264 640×480 resolution at 2500 kbits/s and 128kbps AAC audio. Normally, I export only one half of a football game at a time and let it do the encoding while I’m sleeping. A 30 – 40 minute video will take about 3 to 4 hours on my Power Mac Dual G5 2.0ghz machine.
I had been reading about the Elgato Turbo.264 device which offloads the encoding from the computers CPU to the Turbo.264 Video Encoder Hardware. It looks like a thumb drive and plugs into a USB 2.0 port. Well, I ordered it and received it today.
I did a test to see how it performed. I took a video clip of a Virginia Tech game that was 2 minutes 6 seconds and exported it to Apple TV format. This translates to a 720×480 video at 2500 kbits/s data rate. It took about 9 minutes. Then I plugged in the Elgato Turbo.264 thingamajiggy and had the clip export to the Apple TV (Elgato Turbo) setting. It was done in less than 3 minutes! Amazing! So how’s the quality? Looking at the two video’s side by side, the Turbo.264 encoded video looks far better.
For my final test, I copied the video to my Mac mini which is running Ubuntu 7.04. I brought up VLC and the video looks great on Ubuntu as well.
I highly recommend it. And you too can save $2500 like I did. The Mac Pro is $2499. The Elgato Turbo.264 is far less at Amazon.