HELP PLEASE!!! MPEG-2 RENDER TAKES ME 60HRS!!!!

WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 9:59 AM
Hi,

I have Video Vegas 3 on a 1.6GHZ Intel Pentium 4 with 654MB Ram, 80 GIG 7200rpm HD.. just so that you have an idea.. I have a Sony DCR-TRV340 digital camcorder with firewire input to pc... hmm i guess thats bout what i have...

Now when I open project I open as DV NTSC then i do all my work and when its time to render.. i go in RENDER AS then chose MainConcept MPEG-2 then chose the DVD NTSC template... and when I rendered a 3hr project it tookd me 3 full days!!! more than 60 hrs!!! my project has 2 video tracks and 3 audio tracks... i dont know if that makes a diff... but still 60hrs!!

I have read soooo many of these posts trying to find the answer and tried so many things as dropping the quality and bit rate but it doesn't make any diff well not noticeable diff.. very slow.. the frame rate is like 1 frame every sec.. or slower or a bit faster sometimes...

SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!!!!! I'M BREAKING MY HEAD TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT... I'm sure someone out there should know what my problem is.. please help me..1!!!

THANKS SO MUCH IN ADVANCE!
WinVideo

Comments

Paradox wrote on 2/21/2003, 10:06 AM
Have you tried rendering to a regular DV file first? Perhaps rendering to DV, then rendering that file to mpeg-2 would be more efficient. I have often found this helpful. Especially, if you archive your finished project to DV tape anyway.
Chienworks wrote on 2/21/2003, 10:10 AM
What effects, transitions, titles, filters, etc. are you using? Each of these adds a lot to the rendering time. Also make sure the level faders in the video track are set to 100%. If these are reduced at all they'll add a lot of rendering time too.

Rendering to DV first and then rendering that DV file to MPEG will take longer overall than rendering directly to MPEG, but at least the process will be broken up into two shorter chunks.
WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 10:25 AM
Both my video tracks are 100% but my audio tracks are at different levels.. but even the DV rendering takes the same amount of time...I now selected a 20 sec part of the project with no effects what so ever and its almost same time... its very slow... but a bit faster than when there is an effect....

I just chose Video for windows AVI and then NTSC DV template and its rendering at about 2frames per second rate... is this normal?? its ridiculous..

please help me!
thanks
JackHughs wrote on 2/21/2003, 10:27 AM
This may or may not be of any comfort but here's some comparative math. I have a 450mhz P3. It takes approximately one hour to render one minute of production (with titles, transitions, and color correction). On my machine, your production would take approximately 180 hours to render. You have a 1.6 mhz P4 which is approximately 3.5 times as fast as my antique. All other things being equal, I expect it should take about 50-plus hours to render your production.

Has anyone ever done any rendering benchmark testing on various processors and system configurations?

JackHughs
jetdv wrote on 2/21/2003, 10:34 AM
There is a render test veg

http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/help/kb/

and results were posted at:
http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/rendertest.htm
WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 11:02 AM
i did the test and it took me 3:25 in avi ntsc format 720x480..
is this normal?

but there is this other guy in another newsgroup who tells me that he gets double time for mpeg2 with about same system... like 1 hr video would take 2 hrs...

so is my 60 hrs normal then???
please advice..
WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 11:04 AM
Also I got another question .. now my 60 or so hrs mpeg2 file has finished rendering.. but only that its like 7 gig in size and i want to split it. i read in the newsgroup that TMPGEnc would do it.. i just got it.. but not sure how to split it... any input?
mikkie wrote on 2/21/2003, 11:13 AM
FWIW: If part of your project includes deinterlace, resize, cropping etc., you might be able to render that portion in V/Dub as a separate step. It does mean a second render and is obviously less eficient, but on the other hand it can be worth it: I've tested rendering applying crop, bicubic resize, temporal noise filtering, deinterlace, & converting to another codec all on one file & the render times in V/Dub were like 20 times less compared to VV3 - VV4 is much faster.

Other then that, do the std windows optimizing stuff, turn off networking and virus software, make sure nothing's running in the background that you can easily get rid of, try using good quality vs best. See if you can get the same or similar effects using one instead of two filters etc... Avoid doing things like resize more then once -- know it sounds silly at first glance, but often it's possible to have Vegas resize a clip in the pan/crop, in the proj properties, in render settings, in motion track etc., & if Vegas has to go through x number of steps sizing your video all over the place...

If it helps re: workflow, figure how many minutes you can render overnight etc., and do just that much at a time whilst you're sleeping or at work or whatever. Then use one of the many available mpg2 joining utilities to make one file or use the pieces as is.

mikkie wrote on 2/21/2003, 11:15 AM
go to digital-digest.com & there are several utilities that split/join moeg2 files. TMPenc does it in one of the utility features which work - just easier standalone like with dvtool
JJKizak wrote on 2/21/2003, 12:28 PM
My 1 gig processor renders a 1.5 hr project in approximately 12 hrs.
That is with tons of transistions, fx, 13 sound tracks and 3 video tracks.
I would be checking your hard drives and IRQ allocations, NTFS and 512 file
allocations, which drive you are rendering too, and make sure you don't
have the processor cache turned off in the CMOS. Turn off all virus scans
especially Norton. Your lugging down by a factor of 3 x 1. Make sure your
write caches are enabled on the hard drives and make sure you do not have
a double install of windows OS files which will cut your speed in half. If you
are trying to render to the same drive your OS is on this may be an issue. Be
absolutely sure that all of your hard drives have the same NTFS and 512 allocations.
If one drive is 512 and the other is 4000 you will crawl---.

JJK
WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 2:27 PM
Well hmm I have a SCSI for OS and then an 80GIG IDE 7200rpm for storage of videos.. The OS HD is FAT32 and the storage one is NTFS... I dont know bout allocations though.. where do you check that? but I doubt its something with HD cuz my HD barely works and its taking so long.. If i hear the HD making noise then i could doubt but here its so quiet.. its the processing that seems slow.. by the way I can't find the cpu cache option in my cmos settings.. very strange in all my other pcs i see it.. but not this one... let me know how i see my allocations to make sure its 512..

thanks
roger_74 wrote on 2/21/2003, 2:38 PM
I have found that Motion Blur and Video Supersampling adds a lot to render times. Are you using Motion Blur (Ctrl+Shift+B to show Video Bus Track)?
WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 5:54 PM
I tried TMPGEnc to encode an avi file into MPEG2 and that was pretty fast... how come? is there any other MPEG2 encoder for VV3 that is more efficient???

aussiemick wrote on 2/21/2003, 8:43 PM
The stand alone MC encoder will render avi. files at about real time with a 2.0ghz Pentium 4 but you still have to render to avi. first. Any motion blur will increase render times greatly.
WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 9:41 PM
Where do you see if the motion blur option?? Its strange but my analog cam captures better in dark than the digital one.. so i had to use the brightness effect on all the clips.. so you think that increases the render time?? all my clips have the brightness increased to 10%... and let me know where i check the motion blur and what is that the motion blur do??

thanks everyone for all your comments/help! you all are great!!

WinVideo wrote on 2/21/2003, 10:29 PM
I HAVE QUANTIZE TO FRAMES in Options to ON is that a something to look at?? what is that option.. it was there by default... please let me know if i should leave it on...
thanks
roger_74 wrote on 2/22/2003, 4:49 AM
If you increase brightness 10% on all clips then everything has to be rerendered.
jetdv wrote on 2/22/2003, 8:21 AM
YES. Leave it ON.
CyberPuppy wrote on 2/22/2003, 2:52 PM
Quantize to frames being on will have no effect on the render. It's a tool for frame accurate editing and snapping. You'll note that when you zoom way way in on a video that you can't put the cursor anywhere you want to with Quantize to Frames enabled. With it enabled you'll be snapping to your grid. With it off, you can drop the cursor mid-frame. Again, this has no effect on render.
d1editor wrote on 2/24/2003, 9:04 PM
Hmmmm... I do a weeekly 28:20 TV Show with 4 layers of Video, keys, moving maps, and usually 8 tracks of audio. I render the show to AVI in 18 minutes and burn a DVD (MPEG2) for my client in less than 40 minutes! Your project is 6 times the length or about 4 hours!! One of my clients had a bad show on the Wisdom Channel and wanted me to improve their Beta SP copy... I added several filters: level, saturation, gaussian blur (slight) and film grain--- that did take 10 hours for 24 minutes of material. I believe its all about processing speeds, ram and bus speed!
I have a Soyo Ultra Dragon at 533 bus speed, 2.8 processor and DDR 333Ram.
WinVideo wrote on 2/26/2003, 9:10 AM
I FOUND IT YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

I took a 10 sec clip and start rendering it with different settings and finally found the problem. b4 it took me about 5 minutes for a ten second clip to render in AVI or MPEG2... now it takes me 33seconds for 10 seconds !!!

This was my problem... When I click on add new track (video or audio) it adds a video track BUT with default settings.. and one of them was the TRACK FX function that was enabled.. so all my video and audio tracks had the Green Track FX box on... even though I did not use them.. So when I removed them from all my tracks (video and audio) cuz I did'nt use them in my project.. i now haave a MUCH MUCH better and reasonable time for now.. ;) I prefer doing the fx on each clip rather than the track cuz even when you dont use any effects its taking time!!

I'm sooooooooooo happy now.. THANKS EVERYONE FOR ALL YOUR INPUTS!!!
Have a very nice day!!!
www.winvideo.biz
jetdv wrote on 2/26/2003, 11:05 AM
By default, your video tracks should NOT have any FX defined. I suggest removing all FX from a track, right-click the track, and then choosing "Set default track properties...". Afterwards, all new tracks should not have the FX added unless you add them.