Product Review: Page (1) of 2 - 06/24/09

Elgato's Turbo.264 HD

Hardware USB accelerator and software video encoder for the Mac By Heath McKnight

Elgato's Turbo.264 HD is a pretty cool and affordable hardware USB accelerator and software encoder for the Mac. Easily create high-quality (and small in size) H.264/MPEG-4 movies from your existing videos, and from an AVCHD video camera. You can even use it from within Final Cut Pro 6.x and QuickTime Pro, plus iMovie for those of you working in Apple's consumer editing app.

Input and Output Options
Turbo.264 HD can encode plenty of video formats, including QuickTime, video from a non-encrypted DVD (that's already been extracted), AVI, DV, WMV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 Program/Transport Stream, MPEG-4, MP4, and a whole lot more.

You can encode using presets, including to the iPhone, iPod (Small and Best, two formats), Apple TV, Sony PSP, YouTube and YouTube HD (you can upload directly from the app), and HD (720p and 1080p; it will run on the Playstation 3), plus you can customize your settings, too.

My A/V settings to create a 480i movie

To customize your settings, click Edit from the drop-down menu and in the new window, choose Customize. You can then change your settings to whatever frame size you want, up to 1920 x 1080, frame rate, etc. I created a 480i custom setting (720 x 480i) and a 1080p setting that runs at 24p (23.98 frames per second). You can also keep most of the settings as "Current," which will match your movie's overall settings. You can also customize audio.

Basic editing is easy

Page: 1 2 Next Page

Related Keywords:Macintosh hardware USB video accelerator