It has been some time since I worked on any of the videos and podcasts of our gaming sessions, so I decided to jump back in. Unfortunately, I have built up quite a backlog of material in various formats, so it is a rather intimidating hill to climb. In order to eliminate what I hope is a significant amount of time, I started to play with a free trial of Adobe Premier Pro, as an alternative to Davinci Recode. Beyond the basic learning curve of how to do things in a different interface, my hope is that Adobe renders the video using more graphics card than cpu, so that my processing time will be a bit faster.
Unfortunately, either I have a setting wrong, or fundamentally the rendering process is pretty much the same. From monitoring my system, converting a collection of 60 fps videos to a single large 30 fps video, without changing resolution or other details, runs pretty much identically, and the bottleneck is pure CPU of my workstation. 4 hours of video runs about 6 hours of processing.
The only improvement Adobe seems to have is a standalone queueing app, which allows me to pause or pre-schedule the renders, which helps at least from a timing standpoint. Not only can I set several jobs to run in sequence, but they can also be set to run during idle times, or after I go to bed for the night.
On the other hand, this scheduling option comes at a cost of at least $20/month additional cost for a Premier Pro license, which with my low-budget and low volume process is a challenge to justify. Admittedly, that would give me access to some of the other nicer tools, like After Effects and Audition, but that would also require a commitment on my part that I am not sure I am prepared for.
Further evaluation as I go, since the free trial is good for 7 days, it gives me a little bit of time to try out the options.
