Anyone here has the Firecoder Blu card?

[sebazvideo]

I'm very interested in seeing footage encoded with this card (http://www.grassvalley.com/products/firecoder_blu) which is supposed to encode to h.264 at half the time of the source footage, which is a drastic difference compared to the several hours it takes me encode with any other h.264 solution.

However, having done some test encodes with ATI Stream and its supposed accelerated conversion, I'm weary of any hardware accelerated conversion because ATI Stream is indeed really fast but the picture quality is absolute crap and way below what I consider decent.

Does anybody here have that card and can comment on its performance, perhaps even upload a little sample? To me quality always comes first, but I'm trying to start a business and if there's a card that gives me the chance to encode a two hour timeline in one hour instead of 15, and it has good quality, I'm definitely interested.

[Dark Shikari]

I'm very interested in seeing footage encoded with this card (http://www.grassvalley.com/products/firecoder_blu) which is supposed to encode to h.264 at half the time of the source footage, which is a drastic difference compared to the several hours it takes me encode with any other h.264 solution.I'm pretty sure x264 on --preset ultrafast can encode even faster than that ;)

[sebazvideo]

I'm pretty sure x264 on --preset ultrafast can encode even faster than that ;)

I just did a test on ultrafast and it's fast (38 fps using ABR) but the picture quality is pretty bad to my taste. I couldn't use that.

[Dark Shikari]

I just did a test on ultrafast and it's fast (38 fps using ABR) but the picture quality is pretty bad to my taste. I couldn't use that.That's rather slow; are you sure you're not bottlenecked by decoding? I get over 250fps encoding 720p with ultrafast. In that case, such a hardware card wouldn't help your encoding speed at all.

[sebazvideo]

That's rather slow; are you sure you're not bottlenecked by decoding? I get over 250fps encoding 720p with ultrafast. In that case, such a hardware card wouldn't help your encoding speed at all.

It depends on our respective hardware and the footage, so to compare properly we would have to encode exactly the same footage to exactly the same parameters. I have a Q6700 with 8 GB of RAM. I assume I would get a lot more fps if I fed 720p footage into it, but you may have an i7 or so if you get 250 fps. My footage was from a Canopus HQ AVI file, going through Avisynth into x264, that may have to do with the decoding speed. But I tried to encode directly from the AVI file using the command line and it kept giving me errors, so I gave up for now.

[Dark Shikari]

It depends on our respective hardware and the footage, so to compare properly we would have to encode exactly the same footage to exactly the same parameters. I have a Q6700 with 8 GB of RAM. I assume I would get a lot more fps if I fed 720p footage into it, but you may have an i7 or so if you get 250 fps.720p is only 2.25x faster than 1080p, and I have a very slow i7 (1.6Ghz) which is probably slower than your Q6700.

The 250fps is reading from a raw file. Your framerate is a factor of 3 slower than mine even when considering resolution, so I suspect you may have something else bottlenecking you, such as disk bandwidth, decoding speed, or whatnot.

[AlekseiV]

Key Features

* Transcodes AVCHD to MPEG-2 (transport stream and program stream) and MPEG-2 to H.254 (transport stream)
Somebody get them an editor :p

[Emulgator]

sebazvideo, you may ask for samples at
http://ediusforum.grassvalley.com/forum/
I guess you get to see some samples there.

BTW, the few hardware encoders I saw or have tried
have put me back on track to work software-based...

[kolak]

Is not very good, limited to 4.0 profile, but quite fast.


Andrew