New USB sticks slash H.264 encode times
Gizmodo and others are reporting that Elgato, fine purveyor of hardware based TV tuners for the Mac have started shipping a USB based H.264 encoder that can speed up video encodes to H.264 by up to a factor of four on newer Core 2 Duo Macs and up to 10x for older G4 spec machines. This could be especially useful for TX1 owners who are gagging to convert their weighty Motion JPEG movie files to something more lightweight and accessible.
Video enconding is extremely CPU intensive and can paralyse your machine for hours whilst it converts from one format to another. The Elgato Turbo.264 offloads the computation tasks from your computer's CPU onto it's own hardware based processor, allowing you to continue to browse questionable websites or frag a few enemies whilst the svelte little USB powerhouse munches down on your video conversion.
Typical targets for conversion include iPod, Apple TV and PSP. The Elgato unit retails for about €99 or US$99, and is available now.
If you're looking for a similar solution for the PC, ADS has been offering up Instant Video-to-Go for a while now for US$80. Check out the Engadget coverage.
Whilst I am not yet doing a lot of conversion to other formats, as I sit here now and think about all the footage I captured on holiday, and how I'm going to have to leave my laptop crunching it overnight, these options seem like a real time saver.
3 comments:
Neither device converts to H.264 at full resolution.
Let's hope they come up with a 1280x720P version.
hope your holiday was grand.
I just received my tx1 on monday and I love it! It is so cool. I have already used it as a third camera in a three camera interview shoot... it worked perfectly (as long as there was enough light) but the one problem i had was the continual focusing.... just slightly ever so often the camera would try to refocus. Is there a way to lock the focus? Is there a workaround?
Hey Matt. Thanks very much. Had a great time, but am smarting right this second from a corrupted SDHC card which meant I lost a lot of my videos from the trip :-(
You can use the Auto Focus Lock function by pressing the shutter button half down whilst aiming at your subject, then press the multi-controller. An 'AFL' icon will display showing you've locked off the focus. Recompose the shot as needed. It works for video as well as stills.
By the way, the same thing can be done with exposure, to stop it going lighter/darker during recording.
Check out page 48 of the manual for more details.
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