Are These Rendering Times Normal? / System Upgrade

Tien23 wrote on 10/2/2012, 9:51 PM
I am rendering a video under 45 minutes in length. Most of the source video is 720p, MP4 with no effects other than a slight crop. Less than 10 minutes of the video is a composite of 4 video tracks including a larger than 1080p resolution MP4, another track that is less resolution than 720x480i, another track of basic text w/o animation, and a final track of Sony's solid color (white) media generator. Here is further detail:

System Settings: see my profile please
Software: Movie Studio 12 / current build
Project Settings: DVD Architect NTSC Wide Screen (720x480i, 29.97fps)
Render output: Same as project setting
CPU Rendering Threads: Maxed out at 16
GPU Settings: CUDA GPU Enabled NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB DDR5
Hard Drives: OS, source video, and output are all on a single 7200 rpm drive

Render is at 86% with an elapsed time of just over 20 hours. The timer still shows 3 hours left and it has been showing between 2 and 3 hours left for the past 1.5 hours. Is this normal??? I can selectively pre-render to the same format FAR faster. The odd thing is that when I started rendering, my CPU utilization jumped up to between 80 and 90% while my GPU shot up to 60% or more. However, I came home from work and the most complex part of my video is being rendered but the CPU usage is now below 40% and GPU is below 5%! Why does it vary like this and shouldn't it use MORE processing power when rendering the complex parts of the video? I know my system isn't the best, but neither is it horrible for basic videos. This time seems extremely excessive considering it is only being rendered to DVD compatible MPEG2.

If this is normal, I need some suggestions to improve performance. At this point of time I cannot afford a new motherboard and processor. Additionally I have OEM version of windows which probably will not work on a new motherboard. My only other options are to buy a SSD for my OS and programs. However, to be honest, rebuilding my system on a new drive will be a pain in the...***, Additionally, my motherboard only supports SATA II, so it seems like a waste as SSDs perform best via SATA III. I can add more RAM as well. Finally, I could just add a new hard drive and render to it so the source video and output video are on different drives. What do you think?

Comments

DocSatori wrote on 10/3/2012, 6:48 AM
Without a lot of calculating, I'd expect a maximum rendering time of 7 to 9 hours on your system. You could hit 20 or more BUT you did identify the odd thing - your drop in CPU demand.

If no other application is making a demand on your CPU and the CPU or GPU are not overheating, it must be something to do with storage memory. But, I can't imagine what. You could install some app to monitor your system temperatures, I suppose. You could also wipe the free space on your storage medium.

If it were me, I would take the usual and wise suggestion of rendering your project in smaller segments and assembling them later. Based on your system specs, there doesn't seem to be any real need to upgrade your hardware. This way you could also identify if one segment of your video was significantly more demanding than another.

If your CPU was hitting 90%, additional RAM is meaningless as the bottleneck is at the CPU. The stuff on the RAM would just sit there waiting for the processor.

Your system is very good in my opinion for videos of such resolution of 5 to 15 minutes. If you're planning to regularly create 45 to 60 minute videos, you may want to start saving up money now.
Tien23 wrote on 10/3/2012, 8:32 AM
96% and it has been 31 hours. Could it be possible that I have allocated so much RAM to Sony Vegas that there isn't enough left to manage Window's processes? I am saving up now and looking at new processors and using an SSD for my OS. Is it better to have my source media on a different disk than what I am rendering to as well?
musicvid10 wrote on 10/3/2012, 8:33 AM
It's simple: although rendering is hyperthreaded, filters in the path may not be.
Check your temps. If they are OK, your times are OK.
Your RAM is not the issue. You do need lots of free space on your hard drives.
Tien23 wrote on 10/3/2012, 1:16 PM
My PC knowledge does not extend to hyper threading and filters. I will do some research on this. Any suggestion for a program to monitor CPU temps? So basically, you are saying if the CPU gets hot, it throttles itself down, correct? I leave the cover off of the PC so it should have plenty of airflow.
musicvid10 wrote on 10/3/2012, 1:56 PM
If your computer doesn't have its own temperature utility, Speedfan should work.
The case airflow doesn't matter a whit, it's the cpu fan and heatsink.
DocSatori wrote on 10/3/2012, 2:01 PM
That's right.

Speed Fan, Core Temp and CPUThermometer are three apps I use.

Core Temp also has some add ons including a desktop gadget.

Core Temp's website
musicvid10 wrote on 10/3/2012, 7:32 PM
Doc,
Core Temp is great, and loads a lot faster at startup. I've got Speedfan disabled while I test it for a few weeks.

One disappointing "feature" -- it installed Yahoo toolbar even though I told it not to.
DocSatori wrote on 10/4/2012, 3:10 AM
Oh, I hate those 'toolbar' things! It didn't install on mine. But, they're often easy enough to get rid of. Sorry about that.
Birk Binnard wrote on 10/4/2012, 10:24 AM
That seems like a really long time. I don;t know abou7 AMD processors, but my system is WIn7-64 with 6GB RAM, i7-920, nVidia 9600GT and I render full HD video (1920x1080) input & output at about 3X real time. Prior versions of VMS rendered the same stuff at about 4X real time.

More than a day of render time suggests something is really out of synch with your setup. Could one of your drives be using USB2 instead of SATA? Have you got a bad memory chip that is doing continuous error recovery. Have you run any disk/CPU/memory benchmarks to see if your system is performing as expected?
astar wrote on 10/4/2012, 3:50 PM
As someone said previously, the plugin/filters can make a huge difference in render time. A lot of the filters and text generators are not upgraded or tested with each release.

One thought that came to mind, had to do with the codecs in use. There is an order of things behind the scenes and installing other software that installs codecs can cause the system to try and use a less optimized codec than what ships with Vegas. This is sort of like associating .jpg file with paint vs Photoshop. One idea might be to get a separate hard drive and load the OS / drivers and Vegas only, and see if the performance improves. Obviously make sure you are running the latest video driver for your GPU, or disable GPU rendering and go CPU only, and see if that is faster.

Another thought is the render quality setting, set in the project preference or render template. If you render at BEST vs the default (good), you will increase your render times by a lot. Best uses different different math and that math is more time consuming. In my experience BEST can at least double+ your render times, depending on the content in your project.

From help file:
"Good uses bilinear scaling without integration, while Best uses bicubic scaling with integration. If you're using high-resolution stills (or video) that will be scaled down to the final output size, choosing Best can prevent artifacts."

Last idea that came to mind is to convert the dissimilar video formats into the project settings, so that you can eliminate any bugs with combining formats. I recommend trying the XDCAM format. Drag & Drop any format on the timeline and just having it work, has been one of Vegas's best selling features for years, but it might also be a huge headache in product debugging. The old AVID systems used to make you convert everything to one codec, which I can imagine would be a lot easier to debug issues. One of the big sell points of Final Cut Pro v5,6 or 7 was that you could combine different formats on the timeline. This is something that Vegas was doing since 1.0, some 5+ years before FCP. Still eliminating conversion might speed up rendering.
musicvid10 wrote on 10/4/2012, 9:39 PM
If there is any scaling, resizing, or deinterlace going on, one must use Best for rendering. I leave it on by default. Worst case, it will add 15% to the rendering time (a good deal less than if one forgets it and has to render twice).
Tien23 wrote on 10/14/2012, 10:55 PM
Thanks for all of the replys so far. I have been doing research on hyper threading, processors, and other PC components. My processor core temperatures range from 130 to 142 degrees Fahrenheit. I will soon be running bench marking tests to determine if everything is running as it should.

Additionally, I may build a new system as I am doing more and more video editing. I intend on using 3 hard drives. An SSD for the OS, a 7200rpm spindle for my source media as I have a bunch of media, and another SSD or spindle dedicated to render to. I have heard conflicting ideas. Should I install Sony and my other software to my C (OS) drive or onto my source media drive?

Finally, I am looking at processors. One of the big differences between i5 and i7 is hyper threading. Does Movie Studio 12 make full use of hyper threading? I am trying to determine if I should save a buck and get an i5 or pay more for an i7 with hyper threading. Has anyone seen any real difference with hyper threading?
Birk Binnard wrote on 10/15/2012, 12:32 AM
Hyperthreading means doing more than one thing at a time. For rendering that's what you want - as man render operations (called threads or instruction streams) operating concurrently as possible. The Intel jargon for this is "cores" - 1 "core" = 1 thread = 1 instruction stream.

i7 CPU's have 4 dual-core processors. So 4 x 2 = 8 threads capable of simultaneous operation. i5's have 3 dual-core processors, s0 3 x 2 = 6 and 6 < 8 which means an i7 will render faster than an i5 becuase it can run 2 more render threads.

It used to be that Vegas defaulted to 4 threads max. Now it is 8.So it will use all the CPU power an i7 can provide (and it does.)

In general I install all software on my boot SSD. Most software programs get loaded only once (assuming you have sufficient RAM) so the SSD itself won't help your execution speeds but is sure makes things load fast.

Vegas likes to have input & output media on 2 different drives, but I've experimented with this a bit and not found any huge difference from having input & output on the same drive. These were HDDs and the results might have been different if one was an SSD. That would be an interesting experiment to make.

My system is i7-920 with 6GB RAM. When I render AVCHD (which is all I ever do) I have 8 threads running at about 40 - 80% CPU usage over all. Each thread varies a fair amount but they all usually stay within that range. Some people worry why the threads don't peg at 100%, but this is not an issue because there are lots of other things going on, and they all take some CPU resource.

My system does have an nVidia 9600GT so Vegas uses it's CUDA capability to speed up rendering. For optimal performance you should have either an ATI or nVidia graphics card, because Vegas knows how to use the GPU;s on these cards and that helps rendering speeds a fair amount.

Finally, be sure to give Vegas lots of RAM for video. I think the default is something like 500K or so; on my 6GB system I've bumped this up to 2 GB and have never had a problem.
TOG62 wrote on 10/15/2012, 2:35 AM
i7 CPU's have 4 dual-core processors. So 4 x 2 = 8 threads capable of simultaneous operation. i5's have 3 dual-core processors, s0 3 x 2 = 6 and 6 < 8 which means an i7 will render faster than an i5 becuase it can run 2 more render threads.

This is not correct. Cores and processors within a single chip are synonymous. Multi-threading is the ability to run several process simultaneously by a single core.
Birk Binnard wrote on 10/15/2012, 3:28 AM
Multi-threading is the ability to run several process simultaneously by a single core.

Yes, this is correct. Multi-threading is actually a programming design feature that allows a given workload (such as rendering a video stream) to be broken up into several independent processes/instruction streams, each of which runs independently and separately on a CPU.

Intel's definition of Dual-Core processor is "Runs two independent processor cores in one physical package at the same frequency." Each processor core (or CPU) runs whatever instruction stream the OS presents to it. In virtually every case there are many more instruction streams waiting to be processed than there are CPU's. Win7 running Vegas will likely have several hundred concurrently active instruction streams. The role of the OS is to do what's called Task Switching, namely switchig the machines's CPUS from one task to another in such a way that the most work gets done in the least time. This is a function of the OS itself, not of the application.

Years ago all applications were written as single instruction stream (single thread) code. This is partly because early OS's could only process one instruction stream at a time. And of course early CPUs had only a single processor. But enhancements in compiler design and OS design led to multi-threading and multi-tasking.

Multi-threading allows the OS to switch from one instruction stream (thread) to another on any given CPU; multi-taking means running multiple CPUs at the same time, each of which can switch between multiple instruction streams.

Vegas makes use of all 8 CPUs on an i7 processor, along with the graphics card GPU if it is nVidia or ATI. To do this Vegas has to be smart enough to break its workload up into multiple streams, and then properly recombine the results as each of the 8 CPUs (plus the GPU if that's included) return their results.

How this is done is not discussed outside Sony's development group, but my guess is Vegas does it frame by frame and reassembles each frame's rendered output as it receives it from the various CPUs it uses.
Loopydo wrote on 10/22/2012, 5:45 PM
My setup is similar to yours.
Quad-Core 64-bit CPU
(2) NVIDIA GForce SLI GPU's
8 GB RAM

Rendering from 720i to 1080 Blu-Ray at 10 MB/s, takes about 1/6 to 1/8 real-time speed. That is, a 2 hour video takes about 12 to 16 hours of rendering time.

Suggestions:

1. Don't let Windows manage the pagefile. Instead set its MAX and MIN size the same amount equal to 2x your RAM. If you have a second hard drive, put most of the pagefile on it rather than on the boot drive.

2. Defrag your hard drive. Set a schedule to do it at least one a day.

3. Install another hard drive and ceate a RAID. I have three HD in a RAID5 configuration.