When I built a similar system (for a large consumer electronics company) we built parallel paths for high-priority content; we'd intelligently split the incomin

When I built a similar system (for a large consumer electronics company) we built parallel paths for high-priority content; we'd intelligently split the incoming mezzanine and distribute the 90-120s chunks to a farm of systems, while also completing the multi-pass encodes. When the latter finished, the system would swap them. Because of the business model, we never ran this in full production mode, but it was built and ready to go.