DIT's - Light Iron "ToDailes"

[Rob Engle]

Fellow DIT's, DUT's, and DMT's,

 

I am deploying the Light Iron "ToDailes" H.264, 1080p to iPads "instant" dailies on the set of my next movie. If you have not looked into it I would recommend you do. It is quite impressive.

 

http://www.lightiron.com/products/todailies

 

The key to this dailies workflow is SUPERFAST H.264 transcoding. I would be interested in any feed back on how you have sped up your H.264 encoding. Not matter how cheap or how high end.

 

Thank you!

 

Rob

[grant mcphee]

Hi Rob,

 

I use the Elgato Turbo H264. It's cheap and fast.

 

Sorenson Squeeze is good too as it uses cuda, but I think the Turbo is faster.

 

 

Grant

 

[J Spellman]

I used ToDailies on a 4 week movie.

 

During the shoot, I used Davinci Resolve to create ProRes LT transcodes for editorial. You can render an additional outputs (such as H264) simultaneous to your editorial proxies. Unfortunately, the quality of the H264 at low bitrates is too poor at the moment to be useable. Hopefully BlackMagic will improve it.

 

Therefore, I grabbed the Sorenson Squeeze 30 day demo and used that. It was very fast but has 2 major problems:

 

1) The fast Cuda processing mode producing sync problems, so I had to turn it off. Still pretty fast.

2) The Watch folder option was useless. I was rendering editorial files to one folder, wanted Squeeze to watch that folder and automatically convert H264 versions. But it would jam up on new files, because it was trying to convert them before they were even finished rendering!! Very dumb.

 

Elgato Turbo H264 sounds like a great option. I will look into it next time. I believe LightIron recommends Adobe Media Encoder.

Edited April 7, 2013 by J Spellman