Speeding up Video Rendering/Compressing, what hardware changes?

[gauchogolfer]

Hi all,
I'm working with some large video files (22GB for ~4 minutes of footage) that obviously need to be compressed for distribution (or at least until I can burn to BluRay :cool:). I'm using Adobe Premier Pro on an XP box at work, and would like to speed up this process. Currently it takes about 1 hour to compress this down (fixed bitrate of ~5000K/sec) to get it smaller than 1 GB.

Here are my specs:
HP Workstation
Opteron Dual Core processor (254)
2 GB RAM
160GB RAID SCSI scratch disk
Nvidia Quadro FX 1400

When I go talk to IT to get upgraded, where should I focus on? CPU (more cores/faster)? GPU? More RAM?

Thanks for the help...

[pdpfilms]

I vote RAM!

I'm not sure the GPU is even involved in this process, so that should be fine. Faster CPU will almost always help, but is quite expensive to replace. Since you've only got 2GB RAM, I'd throw some more in (considering how cheap it is these days), and see how it goes.

[AviationFan]

I fear a faster processor is really the only thing that's going to make a significant difference. The video encoding is not very demanding in terms of memory.

A specialized hardware solution such as this one (http://www.everythingusb.com/ads_instant_video_to-go_12252.html) or that one (http://www.fastvdo.com/SmartCapture/) might be something to look into, but I have no hands-on experience with them.

- Martin