HD render times

athomasl wrote on 9/9/2007, 1:02 PM
I have a 2 hour show recorded in HD (Sony HDR-HC3). With Vegas Movie Studio 8.0 I can render to NTSC DVD mpg and to HD m2t in reasonable amounts of time (5 hours), using an IBM Thinkpad with 2GHz cpu and 2GB RAM. This is much better than earlier versions of VMS which took about 48 hours

I was hoping to create a HD WMV version of the movie on a single 9GIG DVD-DL disk for the customer to display through his overhead projector.

This weekend I am trying to render the same timeline to the WMV 8Mbps 1080-30 template, but it looks like it's going to take about 48 hours. Do other people see huge render times like this for HD rendered to WMV?

PS, there's a bug in the render bar. When it was at 46% complete, the progress bar said 1 hour remaining but the elapsed time said 22 hours. As it approached 50%, the time remaining jumped up to match the elapsed time. Unfortunately I need this computer for work tomorrow so I had to kill this job and will try next weekend. I might try the 6Mbps template and see if that's better.

Comments

IRH wrote on 9/9/2007, 1:20 PM
Anthony,

With different ratio on my machine, Yes - my observation is that WMV encoding is significantly longer that Mpeg2-type encodes (whether for SD or for HD, proportionally).

In my unscientific recollection, on my 2.9 Ghz quad core, HD renders to .m2t are a bit less than 1:1 (i.e 1 hour takes a bit less than 1 hour, perhaps even significantly less), but WMV renders to HD generally take 3-5 times as long as the length of the video.

My numbers might be off, but I am absolutely certain that WMV to either SD or HD takes much, much longer than its SD (mpeg2) or HD (m2t) equivalents.

Regards,
Ian.
Eugenia wrote on 9/9/2007, 1:42 PM
What you are seeing is real. Vegas' licensed WMV encoder is _extremely_ slow -- no matter how many threads you use in Vegas' settings panel. This is one of the two reasons I moved to h.264 via FFMPEG (I export with the lossless Huffyuv .avi codec in YUV mode, and then I tell FFMPEG to encode in h.264). Much faster than WMV and comparable quality (if not better).

As long as your customer has Quicktime or VLC installed, you should be able to use my tutorial to export to h.264 from VMS too:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/08/11/from-dvhdvavchd-to-ps3xbox360appletv/
Depending on the speed of his machine, you can consider a 720p export and then burn the file on a DVD and play it from there.

If time is money, you can edit my FFMPEG templates to remove one of the two "passes", so it encodes in half the time (you will only lose about 5% of quality).
4eyes wrote on 9/9/2007, 6:39 PM
anthonytl,
I have same results as you and tried a different method.
Been using the Windows Movie Maker Version 6 (Build 6000), came with Vista Home Premium.
After exporting my videos to hd-mpeg.m2t (transport stream) from VMS I then use a program to put them into PS (program stream) format so Movie Maker 6 recognizes them. I'm using a commercial product to do the conversion, if the conversion from TS to PS isn't correct you will have problems. The conversion is seamless and lossless, only rebuilds the stream, no re-encoding. Movie Maker will accept the TS files but doesn't convert them.

My speeds now are double that of the length of the video. A 30 Minute video takes 1 hour to convert.
My machine is a 2.4 so yours should push out somewhat better. All cores are being used at approx 80% cpu useage.

I've been using the standard HD-Wmv 1440x1080@7800kbs template that's provided, add in the audio and it's approx 8MBS so figure about 60 MegaBytes per minute of HD Video. You can cut this down to 1280x720@6MBS which is approx 45 MegaBytes per minute.

There is also a dvd template (wmv format) that's standard def framesize @ 3MBS. This encodes highdef to wmv at realtime or slightly less than real-time. It also looks very good. Probably on a fast machine like yours you could encode and playback at the sametime if converting to SD resolution.