H.264 and a new era of video

[enclave]

Being an amatuer film maker I loved owning my little Powerbook, it's ran FCP 4 like a champ, never skipped a beat and I could take it anywhere,

Then came the dark day when I dowloaded the new H.264 Batman trailer.

Suffice to say I was very very dissapointed with what I saw, or what I did NOT see.

Frame skipping, slow response etc etc.

I've decided that now is the time to upgrade to a Powermac. The only problem is that HD cameras are so expensive at the moment. My plan is to get the new mac then wait a year or so and buy a new HD Camera.

The only issue I'm having is that if I get the powermac now, in a years time it may not work well with the new HD camera tech. Can anyone here tell me how this batman trailer runs on a dual 2ghz machine and also if they have done any HD editing on one. What was the response like? Render times etc...

Any help is appreciated

Cheers

 

[macbaseball]

Then came the dark day when I dowloaded the new H.264 Batman trailer.

Suffice to say I was very very dissapointed with what I saw, or what I did NOT see.

Frame skipping, slow response etc etc.

Sorry, this sort of pertains to this thread, and it doesn't at the same time. i just tried to compress in H.264 and it got half way really quickly. It seemed to hit a wall and it went from 45 minutes left to 154 within like ten minutes. I don't know what happened, but I cancelled as I was just testing it. I was disappointed that it compressed so poorly. (Although half way through it was only 8 kb).

 

[enclave]

Sorry, this sort of pertains to this thread, and it doesn't at the same time. i just tried to compress in H.264 and it got half way really quickly. It seemed to hit a wall and it went from 45 minutes left to 154 within like ten minutes. I don't know what happened, but I cancelled as I was just testing it. I was disappointed that it compressed so poorly. (Although half way through it was only 8 kb).

It seems this particular codec is being used for the new HD dvd players, if thats the case they had better make a chip that is deisgned solely for decompressing it, if a 1ghz PowerPC chip has trouble with it I shudder to think how much a consumer HD dvd player will be...

 

[vouder17]

Ok well i have a 1.8Ghz iMac G5. The batman trailer looks superb!!! There were no glitches stops....everything went smooth, even at full screen. I even saved it just so that i can see the beauty of h.264 over and over

If I was you i would recommend the iMac G5...really good machine escpecially with this new upgrade

 

[enclave]

I really want a dual proc machine to cut down on render times, it's only a thousand dollars <au> extra...

 

[wrc fan]

I've got a dual 2GHz G5, and even with this I'm unhappy with the performance playing a HD clip full screen. It's obvious to me that it's dropping a few frames. It is still fairly smooth so perhaps most people wouldn't notice and I'm just being picky.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Being an amatuer film maker I loved owning my little Powerbook, it's ran FCP 4 like a champ, never skipped a beat and I could take it anywhere,

Then came the dark day when I dowloaded the new H.264 Batman trailer.

Suffice to say I was very very dissapointed with what I saw, or what I did NOT see.

Frame skipping, slow response etc etc.

I've decided that now is the time to upgrade to a Powermac. The only problem is that HD cameras are so expensive at the moment. My plan is to get the new mac then wait a year or so and buy a new HD Camera.

The only issue I'm having is that if I get the powermac now, in a years time it may not work well with the new HD camera tech. Can anyone here tell me how this batman trailer runs on a dual 2ghz machine and also if they have done any HD editing on one. What was the response like? Render times etc...

Any help is appreciated

Cheers

I think you are misunderstanding the role of h.264. You aren't going to shoot or edit with it. But you will, in the future, use it to deliver your final product. Basically h.264 is to HD want DVD is to SD.

You should not worry about a new computer not working w/next year's HD camera tech 'cause the HD spec's won't be changing anytime soon. Anyway, I assume you don't have the budget for HD and would be using HDV. HDV and DV have the same bit rate, but very different compression methods. HDV's compression method is, in short, a nightmare for post. People using HDV currently are either transcoding to a different format to edit it (which takes time) or down-converting the HDV signal into DV and capturing that. FCP 5.0 is supposed to have native HDV editing, but we won't know how good it is until FCP comes out.

Instead of buying a camera have you thought about renting one or looking for an aspiring DP that already has his own camera? Filmmaking is a communal effort, ya know.

This is a long, but good, FAQ
Link


Lethal

 

[Lacero]

Don't upgrade just quite yet. Apple might be able to move the decoding of the H.264 codec though the video card's GPU. The FSB bottleneck kills H.264 on anything other than the G5s.

 

[sorryiwasdreami]

Ok well i have a 1.8Ghz iMac G5. The batman trailer looks superb!!! There were no glitches stops....everything went smooth, even at full screen. I even saved it just so that i can see the beauty of h.264 over and over

If I was you i would recommend the iMac G5...really good machine escpecially with this new upgrade

I can second this.