Relevancy of T2 HEVC encoding

[whosthis]

I know the hardware support through the T2 chip for h.265 shows up in benchmarks pretty well.

As I am currently not into producing videos at the moment (but that might change, of course), I wonder how big of a deal that really is, or how much you'll be missing without. I am not talking about someone who is going to transcode his complete movie collection, or who uploads his whole live on youtube.

As I understood it, the T2 will only be beneficial for encoding to h.265 - not of much use for decoding?

When producing videos, wouldn't that be just the last step when finishing of the whole project?

If this is only done once per video, then I can easily wait for it or make a cup of tea or walk the dog. Has someone some numbers of how long encoding takes, i.e. a 10 minutes video of 1080 or 4k? All the benchmarks usually tend to tell *what* they actually do.

Just trying to figure out how much I'm losing without a T2.

Thank you.

 

[priitv8]

Isn't it only relevant to Intel Xeons?
All late i5/7/9 CPUs have hardware H.265 encoder onboard (Intel QuickSync), so the T2 would not bring that much to the table.
So far Apple's VideoToolbox does only 8-bit H.265 encodes, so 10-bit and HDR are still handled in software, although Coffee Lake has necessary hardware.

 

[whosthis]

Benchmarks show big improvements with T2 for H.265. But I've never been into video en-/transcoding so far (well, except ripping some videos many years ago).

But if it's a "once-per-video" gain, well, then I really couldn't care less about the speed up, and I wouldn't second-guess going with the last T2-free Mac.

 

[Zdigital2015]

Benchmarks show big improvements with T2 for H.265. But I've never been into video en-/transcoding so far (well, except ripping some videos many years ago).

But if it's a "once-per-video" gain, well, then I really couldn't care less about the speed up, and I wouldn't second-guess going with the last T2-free Mac.

This video -

- and this video -

and this one -

and finally, this one -

- may prove useful to your questions.

 

[priitv8]

But if it's a "once-per-video" gain, well, then I really couldn't care less about the speed up, and I wouldn't second-guess going with the last T2-free Mac.

The difference between hardware accelerated and CPU-only encode can be such, that even for a once-per-video speed gain, you'd want to have it accelerated.
On my current i9 when I encode 10-bit HEVC in HDR10, it takes 9 hours to encode a 15-minute-timeline.
Doing it in hardware-accelerated 8-bit mode decreases this time to 10 minutes...
AVC/H.264 is naturally less taxing on the encode side than HEVC/H.265
But a 9-hour coffee-break is a tad too long for me

 

[Trusteft]

The difference between hardware accelerated and CPU-only encode can be such, that even for a once-per-video speed gain, you'd want to have it accelerated.
On my current i9 when I encode 10-bit HEVC in HDR10, it takes 9 hours to encode a 15-minute-timeline.
Doing it in hardware-accelerated 8-bit mode decreases this time to 10 minutes...
AVC/H.264 is naturally less taxing on the encode side than HEVC/H.265
But a 9-hour coffee-break is a tad too long for me

9 hours? Are you sure it's normal?

 

[whosthis]

Thanks for the comments and links, some of which I had seen but rewatched.

So bottom line is: base MBP is good enough. i9 beats them all. iMP rules them all. So whatever you pick, you have the best one.

If you watch a lot of these videos, you cannot help but think that we are living in a huge bubble... people benchmarking videos on youtube for people doing videos on youtube...

Anyway, finally placed my order today. It was a really hard decision, and probably the one with the most doubts in my history of Mac-buying.

 

[chrfr]

9 hours? Are you sure it's normal?

That's a typical time for H.265 compression in software.

 

[whosthis]

Well, I think if I do come up with some instructional consumer camera filmed YouTube video in the next years, I will just skip the "10-bit HEVC in HDR10" button then.

 

[priitv8]

Well, I think if I do come up with some instructional consumer camera filmed YouTube video in the next years, I will just skip the "10-bit HEVC in HDR10" button then.

I think in this day and age of 4K HDR screens, one wants to capture your hobby movie on a consumer camera, using log gamma and exporting it into HDR10. The added oomph is the same as for Hollywood movies.