ARGH!!!!!!! AC3 encodes...

DJPadre wrote on 7/14/2006, 12:45 AM
The Bane of my existance...

ok, well its not the actual encode, but its the friggin render time..
it seems that the AC3 plugin isnt multithreaded... which is no bad theing when im editing while im rendering, but its friggin frustrating when ur woking with more than 6 audio tracks...

how bout for V7, we have multthread support... DTS would be nice too, but i doubt thats gonna happen... hell i dont even see Dolby TrueHD being offered anytime soon..

Comments

David Jimerson wrote on 7/14/2006, 6:24 AM
One wonders what a DTS license costs.

Mixing in 6.1 would be a nice thing indeed.
Chienworks wrote on 7/14/2006, 6:30 AM
I can't say i've noticed this being a problem. I usually set my renders to have a priority of "below normal". I can then go on and edit in another Vegas window without even noticing that the render is running. Even if i leave the render at the same priority as Vegas i still barely notice any slowing down of my editing process. And before you ask ... i'm working on a slow single-core, single chip Celeron system here.

Even for a two hour project, i don't think i've seen an AC3 encode take more than 15 minutes. True, i'm only working in stereo. But add 4 more tracks and i wouldn't expect it to go abouve 45 minutes. That's not bad at all while you're getting other work done, or eating supper, or walking the dog, or whatever .
riredale wrote on 7/14/2006, 7:01 AM
That's the ticket. You can have multiple instances of Vegas running in the background while you do your work in the foreground. I have a shortcut set up on my PC that automatically opens up an instance of Vegas already set to Idle Priority for just this purpose. Vegas can be thrown about this way because it's such a stable program.
johnmeyer wrote on 7/14/2006, 7:31 AM
Kelly is right about 15 minutes for a two hour project (that's about what it takes on my three-year-old 2.8 GHz P4 which is single threaded).

There is a bug in AC3 rendering that can cause it to slow down horrendously (like 10x the normal time). It happens when you change templates. If you change the AC3 template, and the rendering time is really slow, then cancel the render, quit Vegas, and then start it again. The render will then go fast.
DJPadre wrote on 7/15/2006, 1:46 AM
no no bugs here.. and i create my own customsed templates for DD Ex output <theres no EX presets> , so its a little more invovled than just using a preset.
For one the presets are set as guides, and 2, my encodes are a little more intense than than your standard mix. Usually 6 5.1 tracks (1 for each channel) a single 5.1 track allocated to music <to mix from stereo to 5.1> and a seperate dedicated 5.1 dialogue channel with <centre only so i have 2 centre channels >

For stereo, its not an isue.. but its rare for me to do anything outside of 5.1, so im specifically refering to 5.1

As for a DTS encoder, theyre going for about $2k for a standalone encoder. Theres also Nuendo and afew other plugins which do it, but the fact that DTS is not a mandatory format, means that we prolly wont ever see it as a standard on either Vegas or DVDA

But above all this, irrespective of what is being mixed, the fact remains that the encoder is still only single threaded.