[Wylug-discuss] Follow-ups on system purely for video editing + encoding/rendering

[Dave Fisher]

On 20 June 2010 17:30, John Hodrien <J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
> I've used projectX which is somewhat rough and ready, but is perfectly
> adequate for trimming/cutting/joining work.

Yep, been using it for years, and would recommend it to some classes of user.

> Certainly I've never found the
> performance to be an issue dealing with multi-gigabyte MPEG2 Trasport Streams.
> But I guess it depends on a lot on exactly what you're trying to do just how
> fast you feel it needs to be.

Unfortunately, the problem is precisely with project-x ... and it's
definitely file-size related.

I'm a big cycling fan, and record a lot of free-to air coverage by RAI
(Italian state TV).

Sadly, their schedulers are vastly more crap than ours, so the only
way to guarantee capture is to record 24/7 ... which creates a problem
when the program you want stretches over the few second gap between
individual recordings. Imagine that gap occurring during the final 100
metre sprint for the finishing line.

I record in 6-8 hour chunks, to coincide with the more reliable daily
events, e.g. midnight news. But that can mean I have to handle a 10-16
GB files.

I'd really like to hear about something that outputs like the shell
command split, but doesn't take eons to do it.

Tools like mplayer and ffmpeg should do it by copying at start-end
times, but have had lots of trouble getting them to do it reliably.


> A lot of the focus on fast disks for video editing I thought was based on you
> working with high bitrate video (like 135Mbit SDI).  Just how large are the
> individual streams you're dealing with?

See above.

Actually, the excessive bitrates are mostly in downloads from fan
sites ... where the fan has used some sort of crapware
editing/encoding software to capture their old VHS tapes to DVD MPEG-2
at 8000kbs ... stuff that would look just as good/bad at 1500kbs in a
more compressed format.


Dave