I just rendered a window dub draft for my client yesterday and uploaded it to my DropBox account for her to review. I used the NVENC encoder to do this job, with better than expected results. The minimum bitrate of 1mbs enabled me to bump the frame size from my usual 180x120 to 720x480 with minimal quality loss. I would not have believed 1mbs could look as good as DVD MPEG at 4.5mbs, but it looks almost perfect, even full-screen. The render time was 2X realtime, even with the 50% performance penalty of using a Quicktime 32-bit video CODEC for the original footage (Atomos Shogun recorder). The fact that it took only 48m to render a 90-minute concert with color correction and titles and time code, from DNxHD MOV files, is impressive. The GPU did much of the work and the main CPU wasn't nailed the ceiling on load. Whoever said that hardware encodes look bad at low bitrate should take another look. The quality was so good that I could use a large frame size for the draft. The whole 90 minute video fit in under 700mb h.264 file, which uploaded to DB in about 2 hours on a slow DSL connection. In the past, to get a file that small, I had to use 180x120 frame size or else the block artifacts were horrendous. And the render took HOURS, doing it the software way. NVENC has so many uses that improve workflow productivity. This alone makes the $250 I dropped on a GTX680 on eBay well worth the investment.
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