This is a great program. I'm running it using Parallels on a MacPro tower with 4gigs of RAM.

But is does "take time".

Questions:

1. is there any way that the process could run faster? By that I mean would more RAM help? What about adjusting the number of “Threads” in the settings. I’m not really sure what that does.
2. When I used to transcode this stuff with Red software I had an option to batch create a series of SD 16:9 files. This made for much faster transcoding and subsequently allowed me to get to low-res rushes FAST (to start selecting & editing). Then I could replace this later with the higher-rez stuff. That said the Metafuze software don’t seem to have the same option as it only offers me 720P or 1080p HD Avid MXF codecs. Am I missing something?
3. What exactly is happening in the half good, quarter good, eighth good settings? I assume it dramatically affects picture quality..but is it faster to encode? What is the benefit/tradeoff here?

Thank you...anyone?


                                  
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at Filet

Fish:

is there any way that the process could run faster?

More and faster processors, fastest drives you can get your hands on. If you are running under Parallels, I am guessing that running under BootCamp would be faster. See Igor's Speed Test to get an impression of what various settings and hardware mean for speed.

Fish:

What about adjusting the number of “Threads” in the settings.

These settings do apply to DPX-rendering not to R3D rendering, AFAIK. See this posting for some more details. these settings are used to specify the number of reader threads used to read information via the parser from disk... the remote setting being for disks not phsically in the transcoding system and local for well drives that are local to the system.

 

Fish:

Metafuze software don’t seem to have the same option as it only offers me 720P or 1080p HD Avid MXF codecs.

MF is HD-only. At least, for now.

 

Fish:

What exactly is happening in the half good, quarter good, eighth good settings? I assume it dramatically affects picture quality..but is it faster to encode? What is the benefit/tradeoff here?

It definitely affects rendering speed. The MF manual states that Half Good is commonly used for HD offline editorial. HD finishing may consider Half Premium. The Full Premium setting is usually only done when processing Red files for theatrical mastering in 2K/4K. The difference between half premium and full premium is as good as invisible in 1920x1080.

The following was posted [url=http://community.avid.com/forums/p/74256/415688.aspx#415688[here[/url]: The Full/Half thing is the horizontal sampling, so from a 4K image you will get 4096px at Full, 2048 at Half, 1024 at Quarter and 512 at Eight. Half those numbers for a 2K source. And do the maths for a 3K I guess.

This is all truly awesome. Thanks for the careful reply. I'm on a better track now.