| Encode | 1080i->480p | 720p->480p | 720p->720p30 | 1080i(s)->720p |
| A menc single | 22.15=1.35xT | 55->1.1xT | ~5fps=6xT | |
| Q menc single | 35fps=1.15xT* | 77->0.7+xT* | ||
| A menc 2-pass | 31/24=2.2xT | 68/50=2.07xT | ||
| Q menc 2-pass | 50/49=1.2xT* | |||
| Duo2 menc | 33/25=2.1xT | 4fps?=7xT |
| Encode | 1080i->480p | 720p->480p | 720p->720p60 | 1080i(s)->720p |
| A HB 2-pass | 28/17.5=2.77xT | 41.5/17.5=2.2xT | 13/5=8xT | |
| Q HB 2-pass | 75/45=RT | 80/27=1.19xT | 45/25=1.85xT** | 27/15=3xT |
| A HB single | 11-15fps=2-3xT | 15fps=2.0xT | 6.11fps=9.8xT | 4.7fps=6.3xT |
| Q HB single | 50fps=0.6xT | 17.93fps=3.3xT | 13fps=2.3xT | |
| Duo2 single | 16fps=1.8xT | 40fps=1.5xT* | 5.94fps=5xT |
As can be seen from the table it is 2xT HD on Q6600 and 2x SD on A5000+ and there is no need to distribute since for HD adding A5000+ to help out Q6600 would at best give just 25% gain, and for SD Q6600 would be faster RT anyway and distributing SD would greatly depend on how well new avisynth would support multithreading since Q is not fully loaded with SD with either mencoder or x264.
Commercial detection is a mess. comskip trips, then mencoder trips even more (cannot cut the first right sometimes and almost always ignores the rest of .edl. mplayer however plays those .edl just fine)... so anyway you look at it cutting commercials is manual and thus you have to convert .vproj to .mpg and with .mpg HB is a king (marginally faster at least on Q, fully load CPU and does DPL) unless mencoder could do better on framerate reduction. But HB cannot be run from DRVMSToolbox... So overall DRVMSToolbox way is a miss and I am better off having my own process watching for .vproj appearing somewhere to kick off transcoding workflow.
The biggest problem however is that 720p60 material cannot be framereduced without jerkiness (neither with old HB, and especially not with mencoder) and that means twice number of frames to encode which implies double the work and double the bandwidth.
HB would reduce frames (with slight loss of temporal-quality). The artifacts I am getting are due to keyframes every 30 frames or 1 sec that ffmpeg cannot handle (BD however does require 30frames GOP so I am screwed... What about AVCHD???). Considering that having a keyframe every 30 frames greatly reduce quality I should get back to encoding at 150-300 keyframe intervals and with that SD could be fit into 900kbps at 29.97fps and 720p30 into 2840kbps giving 1Mbps for SD (at 720x480) and 3Mbps for 720p. Still single pass encodes at those high rates suck and the only way to go is to do 2 pass at the same bitrates (going lower on 2 pass creates artifacts and defeat the purpose). HB --denoise (hq3dn) doesn't load CPU 100% on either A or Q, hence once again gotta do 2-pass without denoising, and that means 3xT for SD on A and 3xT for 720p on Q (from local). Then I have networking bottleneck where I cannot get A to pump more that 7Mbps... so copying files off A to do 2-pass encode is not an option until I spend $50 on a new router which I don't really need...
Anyway you slice it, it is too slow... from 3xT for SD on A (or RT on Q if I could pump 30+Mbps over the WiFi) to 3xT for 720p30 on Q from 1080i (at 8xT for 2pass and 6.5xT for single A is not up to the task) all the way to almost 10xT for 720p-720p60 on all dual cores (both 2.6GHz AMD and 2.33GHz Duo2). And it takes quite a bit of bandwidth 1Mbps for SD, 3Mbps for 720p30, over 4Mbps for 720p60 (2.5Mbps has artifacts but is the lowest for 720p60 and similar to 1.5Mbps for 720p30) and around 5Mbps for 1080p30.
720p60 encodes need similar to 1080p60 bandwidth and about as fast at 5xT-6xT (5fps) and is way to much even for 4 core Q6600.
