using two computers to process video and audio, how?

[ou8thisSN]

I have a desktop and a laptop and i'm doing video processing.

It takes about 10 hours to encode 1 hour of DV video on the desktop. during that time, i want to use my laptop to encode the audio files, then it would save me an hour.

the desktop has two hard drives, on the same EIDE channel with a 60gb as the primary master and a 160gb primary slave.

because avisynth isnt SMP capable, both the processors (2 AMD Athlon MP 1900+ (s)) I am not maxing out my CPUs.

here's what i was wondering or wanted to do:

i wanted to access the DV AVI files on my Desktop WHILE it is encoding in CCE and process the audio using the processor on my laptop, and save the audio file on the desktop computer.

the 60gb hard drive isnt being used, but the 160gb is being used for the video files. Is there a way to do this?

I have a 802.11g wireless network setup and i can access files back and forth between the two computers, no problem. so is this even possible?

[ukb008]

It should be possible if you access the parent file through your laptop, launch the audio encoding putting the destination of final and temp files in the 60 GB hard drive. But the real question, I suppose, is whether you can access a file (your parent DV avi) when it is being used by another program. Probably you can't.

Regards.

[Mug Funky]

you can access an avs with multiple computers at the same time.

but if your CPUs aren't maxed out, why not set off an audio encoding app on the secon processor?

then maybe use the lappy to do the second half of the movie at the same time. that'll save you loads of time i'd have thought.

[ppera2]

Things depend much from real connection speed between 2 machine, and CPU load by data transfer. Because DV files are pretty big, it can be problem.

Better solution would be to transfer just audio to laptop - for instance to extract it with Virtual Dub and then encode.

However, all this looks for me as unworthy - I encode audio real fast.

All depends from proportions - data transfer time in compare to audio encoding time + transfer back encoded audio times.

[Kopernikus]

You can also try tsps mt Filter, which should help speedwise with SMP

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=664543#post664543

[ou8thisSN]

thanks for the replies. Yes that is exactly what i did. While CCE was batch encoding 4 different video files, I was extracting and encoding the audio files on the avi files CCE wasnt accessing. Each audio file takes about 45 minutes to process in Adobe using the Surcode Dolby Digital plug-in (i use this because it makes the disc compatible on all dvd players... instead of ac3machine).

I also process the subtitles (datecode extraction and conversion to subtitle) on my laptop, again from the av files not being used. That also takes about 45 minutes for each file. I can also compile the projects in dvd-lab on my laptop while my desktop computer is encoding. While it takes longer to work with files wirelessly over a 802.11g connection than if it were on the hard drive, in the end it saves time.

[orionware]

The best performance you're going to get is by adding a third machine to the mix. Here's the setup I've been using for a few years for video/audio processing and it works quite well.

1 windows 2k server machine acting as a NAS. 4 250 gig drives RAID-0
1 XP pro machine that I use to edit video on
1 XP Pro machine that is basically a workhorse. encoding/processing

The machines are all networking using GIGABIT ethernet. For video files, there is simply no other way unless you like waiting. I can even burn an DVD from files or iso directly off of the NAS Box. I've got a DVD drivein the NAS box and will occasionally use that to rip dvd's.

Works very well and really any old system can be used as the NAS. It's just a file server. At least a P3 or AMD XP1600 will give you the throughput speeds you need over the network

[ppera2]

The best performance you're going to get is by adding a third machine to the mix. Here's the setup I've been using for a few years for video/audio processing and it works quite well.....
Works very well and really any old system can be used as the NAS. It's just a file server. At least a P3 or AMD XP1600 will give you the throughput speeds you need over the network

Nice. Can you give us list of costs, item by item. Especially curious what costs Win 2k server SW.
Then I will ask for some financial support :D