I recently won a copy of FotoMagico Pro via the twitter contest held by Boinx’s Labs. I will be writing more about my nerdy tactics used to help me win.  I have been a FotoMagico user for several years, however my college years kept me out of the photography game.  My winning of the newest version came only a day or so after I did some maternity picks for my cousin.

FotoMagico Pro export settings

I put the software to work, quickly remembering how well it is made.  It does a superb job with snapping guides which make a Ken Burns effect that put Aperture, iMovie, and Motion to shame. It has export presets that make your Apple fanboy mouth water (e.g. Apple TV, HD(720 or 1080), iPad, iPhone, and Screensaver ). I had a montage of the shots from the day set to music with highly tweaked variations of the Ken Burns for each image in under 30mins.  Keep in mind I was cold to the software for over 2 years.

So I had something I liked and I went for export.  I choose HD 720p @30fps like a champ and clicked ‘continue’. There I wait for over 30min while my 2x Dual Core MacPro flexed its render muscle. It took over 30min for 1:58min of video with 1 audio track. Less than awesome if you ask me.  I felt kind of sick. What if I had two or three shoots and I needed to comp and export two or more videos that could very easily double or triple in length.  That creeps in to 3+ hours of render time, without one of them needing the occasional re-render from sloppy editing. I quickly remembered why I avoided video work in school. Rendering.

The mini-render factory

I went back to the export options and saw a magic checkbox which read, “Use Turbo.264 HD Accelerator.” It was grayed out and not checkable. A quick google search revealed that this Turbo.264 HD was some kind of hardware device made by Elgato that you plug in to the computer that cuts the render time of H.264 videos by 50%-75%.  Of course this costs money and I impulse-bought this item via Amazon faster than I bought Angry Birds.

Check this box for awesome!!!

A few days later I have a new set of photos of baby Abby, who had since joined the world. This time I was armed with my new shiny, I mean flat-black, Turbo.264 HD. This time the video was 1:36min long with again one track of audio. I went with the same options 720p @30fps and proudly clicked the once disabled ‘Use Trubo.264 HD Accelerator’. What happened next was magic. The render was complete in under 4min. I did it twice just for fun. Video quality as far as I can see is identical. It was well worth the $90 I paid for the device.

Both FotoMagic Pro and the Elgato Turbo.H264 will be part of my workflow for some time to come, because they make my one-man operation so effortless.