I was wondering if i should upgrade to a dual processor motherboard with say 2 intel pentium 3 600 mhz or so, or if i should just bite the bullet and get like a new pentium 4 or pentium 3 800 mhz to encode video. i was wondering if with a dual processor motherboard i might be able to encode clean video at larger resolutions with less dropped frames. does anyone have any advice or info to share???

-- annoyed lil bugger (ammodium@hotmail.com), December 29, 2000

Answers

I have used dual Celeron 300A running at 2x 450MHz on ABIT BP-6. Works great using TMPEG on WIn2000 Prof, just make sure you turn on the multi threading options. You can see a very good dual CPU utilisation, up to 90+% for both. So I guess it will help you encode higher resolution AVI better. I have sold my dual Cel board and get an ABIT KT7 with AMD Duron 700 running at 900MHz. And to tell you the truth, it is not faster than my dual Cel, and the dual Cel response better for HDD I/O. You can feel it by exploring the HDD while encoding. The dual CPU system will response quicker regradless of the speed, because it has more thread for I/O.

Wonder why you mention drop frame in encoding though. Are you doing single pass capture/encoding? I capture my AVI using Broadway, and then later encode it using TMPEG or Panasonic. No speed improvement using Panasonic though. It is not SMP capable. And even using single Duron 900, the speed is not much different from using single Celeron 450 (as tested using win98). Rusman

-- Rusman E. Priyana (priyana@eudoramail.com), December 30, 2000.

Only the standalone version of Pana encoder is uniprocessor; meaning it doesnt use 2 cpu's. if you use Premiere with the plugin you'll see an immediate difference in speed, i've seen it encode 0.5 x real time, meaning 1 min video = 2 min encoding on a dual p3/933.

-- kevin (boyo@btinternet.com), January 01, 2001.