Quicktime export - why so slow?

[ojwk]

I've recently been exporting some avi files in Quicktime Pro to the format compatible with iPhone. I've been using my PowerMac G5 for this as I didn't think it was a particularly arduous task and I naturally assumed it could handle it.

Well Quicktime gave me an estimate of around 1 hour for a 30 minute 720x480 file - fair enough, but according to the activity monitor I'm only using around 77% CPU power and I have 750MB of RAM free.

Is there a way of dedicating more computer resources to speed up this process? I don't want to use the computer for the next few hours so I would be happy to have it somehow dedicated to those threads although I'm not sure if there is a way how to do this.

Any advice on dedicating the computer to a specific task for a few hours?

 

[Consultant]

Why don't you use your Mac Pro? Encoding video is always a slow task.

That time doesn't seem slower than usual.

 

[Eidorian]

Quicktime != FAST

Try iSquint or VisualHub.

 

[jsw]

I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but it's not impossible the G5 is waiting on system resources (virtual memory?) and is unable to fully utilize the CPU. I don't know of any really "safe" way to prioritize things except to make sure others aren't vying for attention.

 

[ojwk]

Thanks all for advice, much appreciated.

Why don't you use your Mac Pro? Encoding video is always a slow task.

That time doesn't seem slower than usual.

Yeah under usual circumstances I would use the Mac Pro however if I'm rendering something in Shake on that I can't really afford to devote resources to encoding personal entertainment

I guess I'm so used to the Mac Pro speeds at encoding that I forget what it was like before! At least I can leave the G5 to get on with it over a period of time, it's not a particularly long time I just wondered when there was so much idle resources why it wasn't being utilized.

 

[wPod]

somewhat related. . . at least slow quicktime. . . when I upgraded my mac mini core solo to Leopard the time it takes for me to code in quicktime increased and the computer totally freezes up. The computer encodes, but I can not run anything else at all while this is going on. before i installed Leopard when i was running Tiger I could still perform other tasks while quicktime was encoding. any ideas??

 

[GSMiller]

Encoding is a major pain in QuickTime. The only thing I will ever use it for is extracting and exporting the audio from a video file. iSquint is perfect for converting files to .mp4 and playing them on the iPod.

 

[Eric Lewis]

I've recently been exporting some avi files in Quicktime Pro to the format compatible with iPhone. I've been using my PowerMac G5 for this as I didn't think it was a particularly arduous task and I naturally assumed it could handle it.

Well Quicktime gave me an estimate of around 1 hour for a 30 minute 720x480 file - fair enough, but according to the activity monitor I'm only using around 77% CPU power and I have 750MB of RAM free.

Is there a way of dedicating more computer resources to speed up this process? I don't want to use the computer for the next few hours so I would be happy to have it somehow dedicated to those threads although I'm not sure if there is a way how to do this.

Any advice on dedicating the computer to a specific task for a few hours?

what ram do u have> get more

 

[southwos]

I'm trying to export video from .m4v to .mp4 and it is taking about 5 hours for one 1.5hr movie. I have a MP 8 core with 20GB RAM. Under activity monitor QT is only using 161%. What could be causing it not to use more resources?

 

[southwos]

I'm trying to export video from .m4v to .mp4 and it is taking about 5 hours for one 1.5hr movie. I have a MP 8 core with 20GB RAM. Under activity monitor QT is only using 161%. What could be causing it not to use more resources?

Oh, and I'm running 10.5.6

 

[jackerin]

I have a MP 8 core with 20GB RAM. Under activity monitor QT is only using 161%. What could be causing it not to use more resources?

The nature of video encoding, perhaps. Each frame is dependant on the one before it, making video encoding a very linear task that doesn't really take advantage of more than one core.

On a side-note, why are you exporting from m4v to mp4 (unless you're changing resolution)? They're both the same format...

Edit: Happy birthday to this thread, btw.

 

[southwos]

The nature of video encoding, perhaps. Each frame is dependant on the one before it, making video encoding a very linear task that doesn't really take advantage of more than one core.

On a side-note, why are you exporting from m4v to mp4 (unless you're changing resolution)? They're both the same format...

Edit: Happy birthday to this thread, btw.

I was trying to stream to a PS3 and it kept saying unrecognized format. I searched and saw that it was looking for MP4 and didn't look like it was a Apple TV compatible. Basically I was just trying to see if giving it a different format would make any difference. I didn't know they were the same.