Oct 10 2009
Elgato H.264 - Well, that sure helps!
One of the niceties of the latest version of iMovie was that it (Finally) recognizes my JVC hard drive camcorder natively, meaning that I no longer need to go through the tedious (and painfully slow) process of converting it’s oddly formatted files into .dv files in order to work with them directly in iMovie, or any video editing program, for that matter.
When I bought this camcorder back in 2007 I was quite frustrated with the stupid file format that JVC decided to utilize, and frankly, I was surprised that Apple chose to update iMovie to fully support the fact that this camcorder is USB connected (typically OS X only played nice with Firewire connected camcorders), but was also now able to directly handle the silly .mod file format.
So, I had started to work with much of the video that has piled up on the camcorder over the years. Some of I’ve just dumped off to one of my external drives for temporary archiving (and to clear space on the camcorders hard drive), and much more has simply sat on the camcorder hard drive itself.
One downside of converting the video to H.264 was the fact that it was tediously slow. My iMac is only a 2.0ghz Core2 Duo, and despite having 3 gigs of ram (the maximum for the first generation aluminum models) it was still going to take weeks to convert all the video.
So, after talking to my friend Mike Moon about his experience with the Elgato H.264 USB hardware encoder I started looking online, and it wasn’t long before I found someone on toronto.craigslist with the (newer) Turbo.264 HD (High Def model) at a seemingly too-good-to-be-true price.
Sure enough, it was too good to be true - despite being advertised as the HD model, it turned out to be the original (non HD) model. Since my camcorder is not HD regardless, this wasn’t a show stopper for me, but did give me a fair amount of negotiation power with the seller on the price (once I informed him of his oversight) and I ended up getting the unit for a great price.
The long and the short of it? It works great - I’m now seeing video conversions taking place at about 30-40 frames per second in a full quality conversion - more than real-time. Previously I was seeing only a fraction of this without the hardware encoder, and delays aside, it would often leave my iMac sluggish (as both processors were maxed out) for long periods while conversions were taking place. With the Elgato USB dongle now in place I now only see about 50% processor load while a conversion is taking place - still somewhat higher then I had anticipated, but perhaps related to all the USB overhead necessary to read the source video from one USB external drive and export to another.
Overall, a worthy investment for anyone working with H.264 video on a regular basis.