Another Slow MPEG2 Rendering question

AustinC wrote on 5/30/2004, 11:26 PM
Ok I know this has been asked many times, that many actually that it is hard to go through all the messages to find one that fits my situation.

Problem: A one hour AVI file takes about 6+ hours to render to MPEG2

HW: P4 3.2 Ghz overclocked to 3.84Ghx. 1 Gb RAM. 256Mb Video RAM
OS HD 40Gb IDE, video files on a 2 X 120Gb SATA drives in RAID0

SW: Windows XP professional. Vegas LE 3.0C with purchased MPEG
decoder from Sony.

Details: AVI file from a NTSC VCR captured through a Canopus ADVC1394
straight to Vegas 3.0LE. I do minor deletions of some frames,
however it doesn't seem to matter, even if I use an unedited AVI it
still takes ages to render. I have tried varies formats of the MPEG2
and they all seem to take as long as each other.
I tried rendering in WINProducer 3.0 from the exact same AVI file and
it renders in almost real time. Because I only have the LE version of
Vegas I can not change the settings of the MPEG2 decoder.

Also off subject how does Vegas compare to Pinnacle 9 ?

Any help is greatly appreciated on the much talked about subject.

Regards Austin

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 5/31/2004, 12:15 AM
In Vegas 5.0, a straight encoding of a DV AVI file to MPEG on my 2.8 GHz computer is about 1.2x real time. When I say "encoding" I mean just the act of taking an AVI file, with no edits or fX, and turning it into an MPEG2 file.
AustinC wrote on 5/31/2004, 12:21 AM
John, That is what I would expect. I can't work out why I am getting 6x real time. If it would make the difference I would buy the full version of Vegas 5 however living in Australia and the Aussie dollar being $A1 = $U.0.69 it is a big investment if it doesn't help.

Austin
farss wrote on 5/31/2004, 6:03 AM
Austin,
you might qualify for the upgrade discount and if you just download it you also save a fair bit rather than buying it localy although at times New Magic have good bundle deals.

Bob.
kimgr wrote on 5/31/2004, 10:30 AM
Maybe it has something to do with your raid setup/conf.
Try rendering the Mpeg file to the system drive...
AustinC wrote on 6/1/2004, 3:42 AM
kimgr, I have tried rendering to my system disk instead of the raid, it still sucked. My best time I have so far at rendering is 5.25 hrs for a 1.5 hour AVI
I guess I am going to just have to live with this. I think I might test out Pinnacle 9 and see how that does.

Thanks

Austin
dvdude wrote on 6/1/2004, 8:02 AM
You should be getting better numbers than that. I have an Athlon XP (2500 Barton) system with 1GB DDR333. I have 3 drives (system on IDE1, 2 x 80GB IBM's connected to on-board RAID controller but not in RAID config, just master devices on IDE 3 & 4).

So my setup should be quite a bit worse than yours. I just compressed a 1 hour and ten minute AVI to MPEG-2 DVD-A compatible video stream, VBR with 2 pass and it completed in a little over two and a quarter.

Just for completeness, I always arrange things so that the source and destination are different drives (in this case, AVI on IDE 3 and MPG on IDE 4) with the OS and app on the system drive. This reduces the amount of seeking needed during reading and writing.