30 hours to render 3 minutes?

raquii wrote on 11/19/2010, 11:29 PM
I'm using Vegas Pro 10 and don't understand why it takes 30 hours to render a 3 minute video! Yes, I use many plug-in's like Boris and NewBlue.
I'm on a PC loaded with 8 gigs of memory on board!
I MUST render this at high def.
This is simple NOT acceptable from Sony. I can understand 8 hours, but 30? I mean really? Really?

Comments

PerroneFord wrote on 11/20/2010, 12:49 AM
:)

I always get a smile when I read things like this. As if Sony had anything to do with it. So let's start with some basics.

1. What's your timeline? 1080/24p? 2K? What?

2. What's on the timeline? Long-GOP (AVCHD, XDCam) or i-frame?

3. Do you have hi-res stills on your timeline

4. What effects do you have applied and how are they stacked.

5. You've told us how much RAM you have, but what CPU/GPU do you have and what format are you rendering to?

The August 2009 ASC Magazine had an article in it concerning Transformers 2. A few comments in that article really drove home a couple of points. Like this comment:

...There's a lot of information in those frames. Sometimes it took 72 hours per frame to render.

Think about that for a moment. That's 3 DAYS PER FRAME on the render farm at ILM. With probably several dozen machines chewing on it.

Depending on what you are doing, the times you are seeing are perfectly normal. I've had some 20+ hour renders myself on big material with nothing but a base color correction applied. I remember once starting a render on a color job on Friday afternoon, and when I came in Monday morning, it said 15 hours left! :)
raquii wrote on 11/21/2010, 1:18 AM
1. 1080/29

2. AVCHD

3. ?

4. 32 tracks. chroma keyed and light wrap found on majority of the tacks. Boris effects found in each cut inside.

5. AMD Phenom X4 975 Processor
NVIDAI GeForce 9100 integrated graphics

i'm not picky about the formats. (however i refuse to do this in avi) I tried all the formats and found that wmv was best. i've been trying so many different variations on the wmv settings.

I tried sectioning the entire work file into 8parts. and took out the sound. don't need it now. then i thought after that i'll peice all 8 together then sync up the sound later. then re-render. I also tried going into task manager and made Vegas as 'priority'. still, each part came out to 4 and a half hours each! Remember, there is only 3 minutes total in this.
ushere wrote on 11/21/2010, 3:17 AM
32 tracks. chroma keyed and light wrap found on majority of the tacks. Boris effects found in each cut inside.

consider yourself lucky!
John_Cline wrote on 11/21/2010, 3:39 AM
You have 32 chroma keyed tracks with a lot of effects and the AMD processor is probably not the speediest processor you could be using. For what you're doing and the hardware you're using, 30 hours seems perfectly reasonable.

Also, I'm not sure why you're so adamant about not using the AVI format. AVI is simply a container in which you can use a variety of codecs. You could render to AVI using a lossless codec, like Lagarith and then take that lossless AVI and render to any number of different formats. WMV is a distribution format only and besides, it renders quite slowly itself.
ritsmer wrote on 11/21/2010, 3:54 AM
Instead of immediately blaming SCS whatever happens think of this:

If you found that wmv is good for you then just stick to it.

Try to render 10 seconds of your normal footage to that wmv.

I just did it and 10 secs of 1920x1080 50i 17Mbps AVCHD rendered to 1920x1080 9 Mbps (seems to be standard) wmv in 46 seconds - So that is bacically what Vegas does with no add-ons.

Now your project would use (average) some 6000 seconds for rendering the same 10 seconds clip.

6000 to 46 is a factor 130 x more time.

Now it would be interesting to make a test with the 10 sec clip with the FX's etc that you have and then remove the FX'es (Vegas and third party) etc one by one to see which one actually is the culprit....

And then multiply this up to 32 parallel tracks.

Looking forward to hearing the result.

PS: wmv always gives long render times - the same 10 secs clip renders here to 25 Mbps MPEG-2 in just 8 seconds.
farss wrote on 11/21/2010, 4:23 AM
I hope we get to see the final render.

Bob.
PerroneFord wrote on 11/21/2010, 9:33 AM
LOL!

It's either going to rival Avatar...

or not.
Steve Mann wrote on 11/21/2010, 11:58 AM
I have a few five-minute segments that have chromakey and some NewBlueFX applied to every event. Encoding takes between five to nine hours on a quad PS, Windows 7, Vegas 10.

The problem is that with your combination of fx, like mine, virtually every pixel of every frame has to be rendered.