Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Encoding in the Fast Lane: The El Gato Turbo.264 Reviewed
Posted by Vincent Ferrari in "HARDWARE" @ 07:00 AM
Turbo is Precisely The Word
My skepticism utterly evaporated after using the Turbo.264 for the very first time. I had a video I composited together as a tribute for September 11, 2006. In iMovie it took approximately 36 minutes to render. Using the Turbo.264, it took approximately 7. I'm not exaggerating at all, and my jaw nearly dropped as I started realizing just how powerful this device was.
For this review, I wanted to do a side by side benchmark of three of the more popular ways to convert video on the Mac. Using QuickTime Pro, Visual Hub, and the Turbo.264, I compressed the same 7.7 megabyte AVI (XVID encoded) for my iPhone. Here are the results:
Figure 3: The Turbo.264 nearly halves the conversion time of QuickTime Pro and Visual Hub.
As you can see, the Turbo.264 was just a bit shy of shaving 50% off the time of the other two software-only solutions.
