Speeding up video encoding
 

I would like to speed up video cutting/encoding process. Is it all dependable on the overall setting of the computer (CPU, memory, disk speed) or are there some specialized add-on cards that could significantly improve the speed of video work?

The new CPUs kick butt. Huge improvement over P4. Get 2-4GB of ram too. Don't think any cards will help at all.

My intel quad makes is much foaster. Most important in processing is the processor.

In DV mag they tried all types of things memory, raid and the only thing that made a real difference was cpu. If your running PPro the matrox card I think is supposed to speed things up.

yup.. also if software ya using takes advantage of quad core. plus get as much ram as ya can. Procoder3 takes up lots of ram.. but can just leave it and make it run non-stop with no worries. more ram for it.. the faster it processes. got one of my machines runing non-stop

The most important thing is to use fast CPU like a Core 2 Quad and lots of RAM. The software you are running and settings makes even more of a difference, for example Sorenson Squeeze 4.5 encodes video much faster than Cleaner XL 1.5 overall, especially for Flash. However it cannot add watermarks in the encoding process unlike Cleaner XL which can.

Thanks guys, apparently I'll need to get some fresh setup instead of pimpin' up older stuff with some magical add-on cards.

I can't wait for the new quads to come out. It's just matter of weeks now. :)

Yup! Everyone agrees. The FASTEST CPU will reduce your encoding time more than anything else. We just bought some new Core2's and they kick ass.

There is also hardware-only solutions out there as well. They are basically Intel based machines that run Mpeg encoding software, but without windows. I've never tried them but I'm guessing they're ultra fast.