Using several computers to faster render and convert video

Question

I have computer and notebook. How can I use their both performance to faster render video files and to faster convert from one format to another?

I am using Sony Vegas and Camtasia.

Converting from AVI to any small format like MP4.

Answer 1

If you have multiple video files you need to convert in parallel, you can split up the job across the computers; that works fairly well. Just copy the source files as appropriate to the different PCs and run the appropriate conversion/rendering tools on each computer simultaneously.

If you are trying to produce one single video file from one or more source files, I'm afraid there's no easy and efficient way to parallelize generating the output file from multiple computers.

This is not possible even in principle, because the overhead and latency of transferring all the data needed to split up the work across multiple computers would defeat the time savings gained by distributing the work. In other words you would spend more time transferring data back and forth (presumably over gigabit ethernet or similar) than you would spend doing the conversion locally on one box.

The preferred way to speed up video processing is to use hardware acceleration, e.g. Intel QuickSync Video or OpenCL or CUDA (depending on your GPU). If that's not fast enough for you, you might need to purchase custom hardware with a high-bandwidth interconnect between machines (e.g. an "exofiber") which can allow multiple independent boxes with their own CPU/motherboard/RAM to communicate at very high bandwidth and share resources. These clusters are in use at some movie studios but the price tag is staggering.

BTW, the main problem in this area is that the output of one frame often depends on the output of neighboring frames... this is done to save storage space and bandwidth, because some optimizations are possible by encoding frames as relative references to previous frames but with changed data in a limited area (think of moving your mouse across your screen with no other moving elements; the simplest way to express this is to take the source image and the mouse image and transpose the mouse on top of the source image by specifying its coordinates on the screen... some codecs are smart enough to do stuff like this automatically).

Answer 2

Well, this live CD Linux distro says it can do clustering and is built around multimedia production - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynebolic try it!