I'm encoding video and hitting a bottleneck somewhere that's causing it to be really slow. What's the best way to diagnose this? Ie, how do I figure out if it's RAM, CPU, disk I/O etc...?
but - fire up activity monitor and see the various graphs.
If you quit other programs, the encoding won't speed up - so it's not RAM.
You probaably can duplicate a folder and see the IO jump higher - so the IO's not saturated unless you have a really odd encoding situation with some huge res source being encoded down to a 20x20 pixel size.
@IsaacMoses we use Skype for the call, and I use Ecamm Call Recorder to record the conversation. We also all do local recordings - for that I use Sound Studio, and Nathan and Jason use QuickTime. I then sync up the local recordings with the recording of the entire call and edit that
@IsaacMoses I don't think we ever seriously approached SE for funding the hosting, the podcast doesn't really have a ton of listeners so I can host it just fine on my personal Linode instance
we did toy with the idea of asking them to pay for a Soundcloud account, but I don't think we ever did actually ask
@KyleCronin thanks for all the info. In case you're wondering, we're thinking seriously about starting up a podcast at Mi Yodeya. I, for one, do not have much in the way of audio processing experience, and I'm not sure if we have someone who does.
@IsaacMoses It's OK to admit you have a PC, just as long as you also say that you'd buy a Mac if you could ;-)
@IsaacMoses Right. I actually had to use the call recorder version for one of the episodes of the Ask Different Podcast because our guest forgot to record his audio
if you do decide to go with minimal-to-no post production, then I suggest putting some effort into making sure that each person sounds good when on the call
@IsaacMoses well, I mean more in terms of educating the people that are on about reducing background noise, getting a good microphone, making sure their levels are good on their computer, etc
@IsaacMoses one thing to note about having multiple people on is that each person can add to the noise floor of the audio
@KyleCronin All good points. I think SE, for their podcast, sends every participant a standard mic ahead of time, which sounds like a good practice, especially if the number of potential participants is limited
how much do you charge an hour? because there is a certain point at which it no longer makes sense to do that, and instead you just buy a faster machine and pass the savings along to future contracts.
i'm just putting that out there, since when I started doing IT stuff that required fairly complex local VM setups, I did the math, and (in my case) a SSD for $100 would pay for itself in about a month and a half, so I sprang for it.
if i had to redo my previous $1K in technology purchases, i'd have kept the netbook, gotten a beefy desktop, and called it a day. instead of picking up two mediocre laptops. :\
@DanielLawson I love doing the FedEx/hard drive comparison any time someone wants to pay for a fiber connection between two sites. It's ridiculously cheap bandwidth.
And - it's kind of relevant to the video encoding discussion. It's a nice little summary of how pros need to pay for the tools - it's always about the time to turn around a job.
You are right that different engines and also different settings can often make a big difference. Just making sure the compiler has the best optimize flags set for your CPU can really speed encoding up.
Even a modest 5% improvement might save many many hours on a big job like that.
I'm a big fan of the test encode, then encode overnight process :)
I had a great USB H264 encoder that was super until I finally got a mac that could best it natively
The hardware encoding on-chip in 2nd gen Intel Core i processors is AMAZING on a PC, sadlt I'm not aware of any Mac software that can take advantage of it other than airplay mirroring
If you are doing a lot of this work, I would honestly say that it could save you a lot of money (where money=time) to build a dedicated PC rig that's their for ripping and encoding.
You could throw one together pretty cheap, the only expensive part would be the CPU
Feel free to then continue to use the mac for editing and production, using the PC as just a massively quick encode tool.
@stuffe I am using MPEG Streamclip, yes a little older, but I can't find anything that works so well and gives me the options I need. To be quite honest, this is the first time it has been so slow for me.
@stuffe No, it isn't. It's broken up between 100+ files
@stuffe Hehe...good idea; i've been using MPEG Streamclip for years, so I thought it would be just fine...until this
I'd love to build a beefy PC, and use that for encoding
That's my exact plan in the future...maybe...it depends on how the laptop that I'm going to get works. Hopefully I'll get it before the next big project like this.
@jrg :-P
My client would KILL me!!! I know them and have danced with them for years, so I'd have to quit dancing...and that would kill me...
@daviesgeek So she would kill you, and then your last memory on earth would be that of a pretty girl killing you. (and yes, i know i'm making assumptions, but it makes for a good story)
@gentmatt what does iperf tell you?
or rather, try iperf. i suspect that the router is lying to you.
The encrypted volume's password is not required for erasing the disk, only to mount the encrypted volume on the disk. It's unclear whether you're being asked for the password only when connecting the disk, or when you attempt to erase it.
The following steps should work:
Connect the disk to yo...
This answer totally does not work for me (see comments). There's no way for me to reformat an encrypted drive using Disk Utility...
@gentmatt Really? This shouldn't be the case... I'll check and see if I can help you
Hm. I want to test this but do NOT want to erase my actual Time Machine drive...
@gentmatt What should work (if this doesn't actually work for you) would be to zero-out the drive using disk utility first (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/diskX bs=1024k where diskX is the name of the external disk)
As joelseph said in his answer, you should be able to erase an encrypted volume in Disk Utility even without entering the password. However, I do not have a 10.8 system to test this with, and Ian C. said that 10.8 changed this.
If Disk Utility does prevent joelseph's answer from working, wiping ...
@daviesgeek The great thing about that idea is that it doesn't even need to be a beefy PC at all. You won't need graphics cards that chew through a hundred watts a piece, no need of anything other than a CPU and some RAM if you pick the right motherboard.
@daviesgeek All you need is a small footprint case with a regular power supply (400 Watt), a half decent mobo with SATA3 and probably USB3 or ESata, the beefiest Corei7 CPU you can afford and a boat load of RAM because it's cheap and a couple of hotswap bays for easy hard disk removal.
@daviesgeek No monitor, keyboard, mouse, just a box running Win that has a fat CPU and RAM - use the onboard sound and GPU - unlikely to need a clever cooling solution without a ridiculous watt eating gaming graphics card.
The encrypted volume's password is not required for erasing the disk, only to mount the encrypted volume on the disk. It's unclear whether you're being asked for the password only when connecting the disk, or when you attempt to erase it.
The following steps should work:
Connect the disk to yo...
