Fast exporting for quick delivery

If hardware is my only answer to make things quicker, can any one recommend which one?

E.

Looks like this thread got a little off topic...

I think that new hardware might give you a slight improvement in speed, but you are needing to doing a whole lot of things very fast. I would try out some of the recommendations for re-ordering your workflow first (using more machines, use the GPU as much as possible, changing how you present the video, etc.)

I'm actually very impressed at the speed you are getting currently, (about 2x real time) especially since it is 1080 material.

I'd consider an inexpensive real-time DVD recorder and a device that will convert to analog and downscale for you.

The suggestion for progressive workflow is a good one = and should help with some of your display issues, make for cleaner encodes...and just might be a lil faster

This way, you're doing a real-time downconvert in hardware and after the 12 minutes, you hit finalize and you hand over the DVD.

I'd be surprised to learn how well your downconverts are going - because our 1080i downconvert to DVD look terrible (field dominance and scaling issues) - we do a R/T downconvert and recapture and make SD DVD from that.

Shoot progressive, edit that way, burn a DVD that way. You can create Progressive SD DVDs. Just not sure iDVD does that. Toast 11 may be an authoring/burning option, also. Not sure how it's speed compares to iDVD.

Progressive to interlace is not a problem. Splitting a whole image into fields is not a big deal, as you're starting with a whole image. It's going interlaced to progressive where you have problems, as you have to jump through hoops to marry the two fields into one whole image.

I-Frame codecs transcode infinity faster to anything else, than Long-GOP trancodes to anything else. Every export / transcode of a Log-GOP video has to rearrange the "GOP" structure, not to mention is has to read every GOP frame every time it compiles one single frame of data.

Thanks for the replies,
We working on changing our all 20 cameras to 1080p but that will take time.
we used real time DVD burners in the past but now we need two YouTube upload file ready, one HD and one small for fast upload.
I was hoping to find workflow/hardware solution so the editor can finish the project, let the customers view it, convert to the different codecs while he doing other editing.

E.

You may want to get a Mac Mini, and an old copy if Final Cut Server. That will automate everything for you way better.

Could you explain a bit more please

E.