How long should Blu Ray prepare take?

Steve Grisetti wrote on 1/3/2015, 4:05 PM

Does your Optimize Disc screen indicate a need to re-render your video or are you just assuming it doesn't need to?

What are you menu pages composed of?

PeterDuke wrote on 1/3/2015, 4:19 PM

Have you accidentally loaded your video in as the menu background?

NCARalph wrote on 1/3/2015, 4:54 PM

DVDA disk optimize shows neither the main video or audio needs re-rendering, the menu does need rendering, but that plus preparing the MUI takes about 5:30 minutes. The menu is just a still background, some sound, 3 text boxes, and 10 buttons in a Scene Selection Menu which are tied to saved markers in the rendered m2v file.

DVDA then goes into Preparing Compiling mode (step 2) and it takes about 2 hours while it says "Preparing compilation (processing file 0000.mts)".

Everything completes correctly and the BR looks great, but that's a long time.

This is with DVDA Pro 6 build 237.

Kimberly wrote on 1/3/2015, 10:38 PM

My Blu-Ray prepare on a 2012 Dell XPS laptop for 30-40 minutes of content takes about 12 minutes. A DVD prepare for the same content takes about 9 minutes. In each instance I've sent BD (or DVD) compliant media to DVD-A. So 2 hours seems a bit "long" but that may not be an apples to apples answer.

Regards,

Kimberly

PeterDuke wrote on 1/4/2015, 1:24 AM

Are you running out of memory or disk space for Windows itself or for DVDA in any of its temporary file locations?

NCARalph wrote on 1/4/2015, 4:12 PM

I've run a bunch of tests now by moving the source files, temp files, and output files to different disks. All the disks are de-fragged and have lots of free space (400-500GB)

WRT memory - RAM, I've got 12GB on the machine and it never gets above about 3 GB in use and DVDA only uses about 300MB or so. It also only uses one of the CPU's which averages about 60-70% usage.

The temp file seems to be the bottleneck, the drive it's on has a queue about 1-2 operations deep while the compile step is running. This is on a 7200 RPM Raid 0 drive set.

Separating the source files from the temp files helped a little bit, about 8 minutes or so, but that's not an overwhelming difference. Separating the source, temp and system drives didn't improve that at all.

Creating a single movie disk, that is with no menu, helped by a few minutes, removing all the button thumbnails didn't make any appreciable difference.

What are other people seeing for BR prepare times for hour and a half videos?

NCARalph wrote on 1/4/2015, 4:17 PM

@Kimberly: Does your XPS laptop have any special disk hardware like an SSD?

PeterDuke wrote on 1/4/2015, 11:09 PM

"What are other people seeing for BR prepare times for hour and a half videos?"

I just re-made a BD ISO file (no burn) for a 1.5 hour AVCHD video. The main and scene menus are static images, no sound.

Time to render the menus: 41s
Time to prepare the ISO file: 4m 11s

I have a quad core i7 processor with hyperthreading. During the prepare stage only three cores are used but it looks like only one at any instant. The average CPU usage is about 10% but the peak usage of a core is about 80-90%.

This was for DVD Arch 5.2

PeterDuke wrote on 1/4/2015, 11:35 PM

I just noticed that your computer takes a lot longer (8 times) to render the menu than mine, as well as the longer prepare time.

What CPU do you have and what clock rate?

Edit

I should have looked at your profile: I7 2.67 GHz which is about the same as mine: i7 920 2.7 GHz.

Kimberly wrote on 1/5/2015, 11:32 AM

@Kimberly: Does your XPS laptop have any special disk hardware like an SSD?

It does have a small SSD but the main 1T drive is only 5,400 RPM and all the programs and data live on the 1T drive. In 2012 the option for a faster HD was prohibitive so I went with the larger, cheaper, slower. It is 64-bit with 16 gig of RAM. But otherwise just a "nice" 2+ year old Dell XPS laptop.

I'd like to do a 2-hour test project but may not have time . . . the one thing about my disks is they run 35-45 minutes, but they are all 3-5 minute individually rendered segments of compliant MPEG-2 media + separate audio and I stick 'em together in a playlist or compilation. So each disk is comprised of 10-12 little segments rather than one big segment. Would that approach affect the overall render time?

Jumping Rascal wrote on 1/5/2015, 12:45 PM

I recently prepared a roughly five hour BD using DVDA 6.0. There were several submenus. The compile time was about 1.5 hrs. The original files were prepared with V13 (DVDA templates) and weren't recompiled by DVDA. My system has an i7 and a Radeon 5870 video card. Is it possible that you have set your button properties/media/thumbnail properties/style to animated instead of still? The animated choice would very substantially increase your compile time. Also, I tend to use a jpg screen image of the video as my thumbnail properties/thumbnail media instead of the actual video media file (such as m2ts or mpg). I found that this latter choice made a slight difference in a larger multi menu project.

NCARalph wrote on 1/6/2015, 1:34 PM

I just tried it with DVDA 5 and it took 48 min with a wav file! The same project (with the wav file) was over 2:30 hours on DVDA 6.

Something is very wrong with my DVDA 6 setup. I'm going to try uninstalling it and getting a fresh download, although it does create good files and doesn't crash.

I'll also try doing it with individual files, I'm using a single large video file with saved markers and the buttons are jpg files. The background is a 1 minute video loop containing a still image with some sound. I tried it with no button images and just the default background jpg and it was the same.

If I build a DVD with a lower resolution video and audio file but the same menu it just takes a few minutes to build.

Thanks for the help BTW!

videoITguy wrote on 1/6/2015, 1:51 PM

The people experiencing extra-ordinary long prepare times - really most likely have issues with their authoring choices and selected processes getting there. Examine JumpingRascal comment for a really good example of a milestone checker.

NCARalph wrote on 1/6/2015, 5:03 PM

@videoITguy - I'm not at all sure what you are trying to say.

JumpingRascal suggested that the buttons may be animated, but as I mentioned, in one case they are simple jpg files and in another there are no images in the buttons at all.

The prepare time is very close to the same for both.

The only thing that's shown a big difference is using DVDA 5 rather than 6.

videoITguy wrote on 1/6/2015, 5:26 PM

There is one fundamental bug difference between DVDAPro 5.0b and DVDAPro Ver 6.

That bug was introduced in Version 6 having to do with handling .wav form audio as in input and particularly so when made an asset in a menu or a looping menu. How extensive this new bug causes problems in general has never been documented or acknowledged by SCS.

Given the work stoppage on all further DVDAPro development and bug reduction activities, DVDAPro Version 6 is not a recommended application.

NCARalph wrote on 1/7/2015, 12:32 PM

I uninstalled DVDA 6, redownloaded and reinstalled it and apparently it's better. It now takes 48 min to create the Blu ray which is the same as DVDA 5. This still seems a bit slow to me, but is more in line with what others are seeing.

I saw no difference between using individual videos files for the regions vs a single file with markers, between no thumbnails and jpg thumbnails, or a video loop vs jpg for the main menu background.

What changed with the reinstall I have no idea either.

NCARalph wrote on 1/8/2015, 5:49 PM

I'm still not all that impressed by the time it takes, but at least it's not crazy any longer.

Thanks everyone for the help, I appreciate it.
Ralph

Spoons wrote on 3/18/2015, 9:18 PM

NCARalph, has the preparation times gotten any better for you? I am running into the same issues and my preparation times are 20 hours even though all project and render settings are perfect.

brady-wurtz wrote on 11/17/2017, 12:50 PM

I know this is an old post, but I'm trying to burn a Bluray AVCHD with .m2v 1080i files and AC3 audio files as well. It takes me up to 12+ hours. i5 with 8GB RAM. Is this normal?

EricLNZ wrote on 11/17/2017, 5:25 PM

I don't think so. Is the video being recompressed?

brady-wurtz wrote on 11/19/2017, 10:41 AM

No. I've tried it with files that need to be compressed and files that don't need to be compressed, just to see.

found out it's only when it's "Preparing Compilation - processing file 000003.m2ts" that it hangs up and freezes once it gets to zero on the count down. then it shoots up to 90 hours, then 120 hours, and then later ends up stopping with the following error..."Video buffer underflows"

alderny wrote on 12/5/2017, 4:57 PM

My recent experience with DVDA (build 67) has lead me to believe that there are parameters within it that are not reachable through the user interface, and that nothing can be done about them when they get into a 'bad' state. Here is my example...

Firstly, within Vegas I used the 'render as' option to create video and audio files for my movie project for both DVD and Blu-ray discs. My timeline contained markers, named as I would want them to appear in the final menu.

I created a DVD menu (3 pages with a total of about 25 links - nothing fancy) and wanted to clone this for my Blu-ray version. The render and build time for this was under 60 seconds for a 90 minute video.

My first attempt was to make a copy of the DVDA project file (eg. DVD.dar copied to Bluray.dar), then temporarily rename the video and audio files so DVDA could not find the media files when it opened the Bluray.dar project. This caused DVDA to open a dialogue where I could choose to 'specify a new location or replacement file', so I selected the prepared Blu-ray files. I also had to change the disc type from DVD to Blu-ray in the project properties.

The preview worked perfectly, and when I started to prepare the files I had no error or warning messages. However, instead of taking a few minutes, DVDA was predicting several hours to completion!

My second attempt was to save the menu pages in my DVD.dar project as themes. Then I used 'make movie' from within Vegas and selected Blu-ray with menus. When DVDA opened I imported my previously saved themes. Again, The preview worked perfectly, and when I started to prepare the files I had no error or warning messages. Fortunately, the total time to render the menu pages and prepare the files was now just 13 minutes.

I apparently did the same thing two different ways - one worked, the other didn't. The long prepare time certainly had nothing to do with rendering, as the only things to render were the menu pages which takes very little time.