Any Flash Wizards here?

[Hell Puppy]

Originally Posted by gonzo

A nice card can cut your render time to a fraction of the original.

Only if upgrading from something archaic. No one is really using the GPU for doing much more than de-interlacing.

If going full out with a ton of video on a regular basis, if it were me I'd throw a Linux server on the network that is a horse and setup batch jobs to look in a folder and encode whatever is there and drop it into another folder when done. That way I could just drop 'em and let it chew 24/7 if needed. Minimal investment as the machine doesn't really need a nice monitor or anything else beyond cpu, ram, hard drives, etc.

Damn, something like that would be a great trade show seminar....an industrious fellow could probably even sell boxes...but I digress...

But I've sometimes been known to be a bit of a geek...heh

For flash encoding in particular, your bottle neck is likely CPU. I'd throw the fastest quadcore processor I could find at it.

Look at any other potential bottlenecks as well. I wouldn't encode across the LAN, i'd make it local with the files on hard drive on encoding machine. And the drive doing the work should be a fast one.

Unless you are 64 bit, anything above 2 gigs of ram probably isn't being used.

The windows world will change in this regard over next 6 months. I'm guessing most Windows 7 installs will be 64 bit, and I know there are hardware encoding solutions coming.