I am quite happy with the Pavtube Converter. It is easy to use and supports many different formats. Picture quality is very good for HD conversions, which is all I have used it for so far. It does what I want & at a reasonable price.

jimmy

Search for Divide frame GPU Decoder and you tell me :D

(btw you do know that the amazing Apple quicktime package, on Windows, neither support HW h.264 accel in video cards nor multiple CPU cores? And is not even very efficient even on the one CPU core it does run on?)

I expect that Windows 7 will really help solve Video editing problems for those who use PC’s. I’m going to install some editing software to see if it helps.

I think the main reason it is better is that system overhead in windows 7 is much lower, allowing your processor to devote more resources to the video. Its also very nice to have built-in support for .mov files, QT is very buggy on pc’s.

although it stinks in every other way, cyberlink editor, that uses HW decoding instead of slothful/no-HW decoding/only 1 CPU core/etc. Quicktime, appears to allow realtime h.264 editing. But it has so many other issues don’t even bother with it. A useless mess for 5DMkII editing.

Quicktime is both the underlying video technology of the Mac as well as a player application so it’s likely that with the re-architecture of QT in 10.6 that those benefits will appear in FCP 7, but don’t expect it to be any faster. Most Macs can’t even reliably playback 1080p 30fps H.264 footage, let alone reconstruct frames on the fly to make real-time edits.

Real time h.264 editing could become possible with some dedicated hardware and standard definition editing might be possible on some really high end workstations, but in both cases there would be major limitations on the number of video track.

The only truely native realtime mixed format HD video editing that can handle the Canon files without conversion is Grass Valley’s Edius Pro, and the only true 1080p Real Time editing and output of that is with the HDSTORM, HDTHUNDER or HDSPARK PCIe boards added.

Quicktime is just for playback as John said…

But that’s assuming it does come, which is unlikely. Codecs like H.264 are the reason that ProRes exists in the first place – they are too processor-intensive and complex to be viable as an editing codec. Not only must the data be constantly compressed and decompressed, it must be rearranged because H.264 does not store frames in playback order. Do you really want that kind of intense number crunching to happen every time you make an edit or add a filter?

ProRes is intended as an intermediate codec. It is designed to transition between an acquisition format and a delivery format, so quality loss is minimal. If there was a substantial quality loss that was noticeable to viewers or affected color correction or effects, do you think anyone would use it for professional work?

ProRes is designed as an alternative to Uncompressed 422. It offers comparable quality with sufficiently lower storage requirements – so if you are really bothered by the tiny, imperceptible quality loss with ProRes, use Uncompressed 422.

Just don’t edit H.264. It will drive you insane.