Everyday, I receive few 50 GB files from my partner. I need to trans-code them using a C++ program into 12 profiles.
If one profile takes an hour so it takes 12 hours to trans-code to all 12 profiles from one source file.
How can Amazon Web Services help here to save time and money?
Option 1: Amazon Elastic Transcoder
From the documentation page:
Amazon Elastic Transcoder lets you convert media files that you have stored in Amazon S3 into media files in the formats required by consumer playback devices. For example, you can convert large, high-quality digital media files into formats that users can play back on mobile devices, tablets, web browsers, and connected televisions.
To use the Elastic Transcoder, upload the source video files to Amazon S3. Then, configure jobs to transcode the video. A job can transcode a video into multiple formats simultaneously. The output files will be stored back into Amazon S3.
Option 2: Go Parallel
Rather than running one computer for 12 hours, consider running multiple computers in parallel (eg 6 computers for 2 hours each). Amazon EC2 is charged per hour, so the total cost is the same.
You should also experiment with different Instance Types to determine the best price/performance for your particular transcoding job. This will help you determine whether you should run on larger, faster EC2 instances, or on a larger number of smaller instances.
You could use Amazon Batch to manage the work of distributing work amongst the EC2 instances. (However, using Amazon Elastic Transcoder would certainly be simpler!)