The Setup
In order to guage which methods will work on various hardware configurations, each encoding workflow discussed on this site will be conducted on the Mac hardware at my disposal:
- 1.87GHz Intel CoreDuo iMac (stock hard drive, 1.5GB ram)
- Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5 (stock hard drive, 2GB ram)
- 1.25GHz PowerBook G4 (stock drive, 512MB ram)
The source material used in these demonstrations is chapter 19 from the Star Trek: Nemesis DVD. For all its failings as a film, I chose this particular video because of its mixture of action sequences, still shots, bright scenes, dark scenes and color gradients. Plus, the chapter is only 5 minutes 59 seconds long, which will help speed the testing along.