Posts Tagged ‘video’

Another year gone by.  Good riddance, 2008.  I lost my grandmother and father within a week of each other in October.  When all the older members of your family are gone, you get a new perspective on life.  I don’t have parents to lean on for advice anymore.

With the losses in my family the last few years, I am now on a mission to preserve as much history as possible.  I am scanning negatives and photos and storing them in Aperture.  I have a box full of 8mm film that I need to have converted.  I’ve got a ton of geneology stuff that my mom had.  I also have Digital 8 tapes of my own kids that I am converting to MPEG4 movies.  I’m worried that my Sony Digital 8 camera is going to fail before I can get all these tapes migrated.

So this is my mission for 2009.  How am I going to accomplish all this?  I’ll blog about this in the future.

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.