HELP: Render Performance!

Steve M wrote on 4/2/2006, 12:26 PM
I’m using Movie Studio Platinum 6.0a, and I’m experiencing very slow rendering times. I’ve created a 5 min clip from an HDV (Sony HDR-HC1) recording. To render the 5 min clip to an 8mbs WMV, it takes about 100 minutes. That would mean a full 60 minute tape would take 20 hours, or almost 1 day!

The weird thing is that it will burst through 1 second of video in about a second. Then, it stops on frame 29 for about 20 seconds. Then the process repeats for the next second of video. Hopefully there is some setting that is messed up. I’m not using any effects, or any other special processing (as far as I know). This is a simple “split” edit of a larger file that I captured from tape.

I’m running this on a P4 640 HT, with 2GB DDR2 PC4200, and 2 SATA drives (video is written to the second non-system drive). I can’t imagine this is the best I can expect. Thanks in advance,

Steve

Comments

rustier wrote on 4/2/2006, 5:44 PM
What type of video card?
What other processes are running?
Have you tried a selective boot to shut off all other processes before rendering?

When its render time for me I choose a time I can totally devote all processes to the rendering with nothing else running - perhaps a bit extreme, but my render times are pretty good. I must confess I have not tried to render any HDV - I understand this is much more time consuming.

The second non system drive as in external? A firewire interface?

One thing I know for sure if you process the video with one drive and save it to another you can really cut your render times.
Steve M wrote on 4/2/2006, 6:52 PM
It"s a PNY NVidia 6800 with 256MB on board. The CPU is 3.2 Ghz. I don't believe anything else is running that would impact performance, at least it does not show up in task manager. The second drive is internal SATA, and yes, the capture and the WMV are on different drives.

It's really strange how it will move right along, then pause after one second of video (29 frames). It's like it needs to do some crunching for every second of video. Maybe I'll try 480i DV and see what the times are. What kind of times would you see when rendering captured DV to a WMV? Thanks,

Steve
ritsmer wrote on 4/3/2006, 1:09 AM
The desired Quality of the rendered output seems to be a parameter that has exponential influence on the rendering time.
This parameter is under Advanced render + Custom + Video + Quality.
If it comes even a little over 90%, the rendering time goes up in the extreme.
If You want to use your computer when it is rendering, just press Ctrl+Alt+Delete, find VegasMovieStudio under the flap Processes, right click it, click Priority and set it to Low.
Then Vegas renders happily in the background, and You will not feel any delay in Your orher work.

One Fantastic thing about Vegas is even, that if You render one video in the background, just start Vegas one more time, and You can edit another video.

When I am really busy, I can have 2 Vegas's rendering with low priority in the background and be editing in a third Vegas having normal priority.

Just make sure You have enough memory - one rendering Vegas uses - on my machine - approximately 800 MB - so with my 1 GB RAM + 2 GB paging memory it gets close to the limit.

If You have a CPU with HT (Hyper Threading) this feature gives about 10% lower rendering times - if You have allowed this under Preferences + Video + Maximum number of rendering threads - should be 2 on a HT CPU.

Enourmous amounts of calculations are done when You render. Specially during cross-fades, Video FX's etc.
Some Vegas users have dual CPU's, and Vegas is designed to make use of this.
What many of us are looking forward to, will be the new Conroe CPU's coming in 3´or 4Q 2006. Imagine the impact of a motherboard with 2 dual core CPU's on the rendering times - and for a payable price, I hope :)

The 29 frames at a time is a quite normal thing in Vegas's rendering machine - If you render to PAL the number is 25 - so it seems Vegas crunches 1 second at a time.
Steve M wrote on 4/3/2006, 5:13 AM
I guess it comes down to if 20 seconds for each second of video is typical (and acceptable). I would have hoped for better given the class of hardware I'm using.

I don't have access to my PC right now, but I believe the VMS default for video quality is 90%. I will try lowering it to see if I can gain rendering speed without trading off too much quality.

Again, this is all without any FX. All I did was capture from my HDR-HC1, then split a 5 minute clip from the 60 minute video. If I add FX (color correction, etc), could I be looking at weeks to render?

Does anyone have direct experience rendering captured HDV video to WMV (720p or 1080i)? Do you see 20X rendering times? Is the full version of Vegas any faster?
Chienworks wrote on 4/3/2006, 6:55 AM
For comparison ... i plopped a 20 second 18Mbps 1080p 29.97fps .m2t file on the timeline and rendered to 8Mbps WMV using the stock 1080p template. Rendering time on a 2.66GHz Celeron was 12 minutes 23 seconds. That's about 37x rendering time. And yes, there was a long pause after frames 29, 59, 89, etc.
badgerballs wrote on 4/3/2006, 10:13 AM
AHHA another one bites the dust. I learnt this lesson a long time ago. I have had SATA raid systems since they started and they are a right pain in the butt. Not least there is no decent info on the net as to why (I reckon it is suck it and see) anything goes tits up. In fact although this has been around for some time there are still very few people using them. In my experience trying to do any rendering across a SATA raid is fraught with danger. I have even had drives fold in the past due to this. So the way I work is to have my 2 Raid (mirror)160 drives with all my op stuff on and render to 2* 200gig standard 7200 ide drives. I get great rendering times and no drive failures. Hope this helps.
regards
Steve M wrote on 4/3/2006, 10:55 AM
The drives are not RAID, and I don't believe disk performance is my problem. I'm able to copy >2GB per minute between the drives. The P4 640 3.2 Ghz CPU on the other hand is pegged at 100%. With 2GB 533Mhz, DDR2, memory should not be an issue either. I know there's better hardware out there, but what I have isn't too shabby.