Is it just me?

mam wrote on 8/13/2007, 12:58 PM

Well, I recently updated from VMSP 6 to VMSP 8. Ever since then, my render times have increased. I usually work on .5 hour projects that used to take about 12 minutes to render on my P4 dual core machine. They now take between a half hour to 45 minutes to render. I've not changed a thing in my setup. I even went back to rendering in Version 6 to see what the difference was, but now it takes just as long in version 6. Am I goofy or what? Was something automatically changed in my setup when I installed version 8.0?
Arrgggh ... software.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 8/13/2007, 1:13 PM

Please go to the Settings and change the "threads" to as many threads as CPUs/cores/hyperthreds your PC has. This might help with rendering times.

ADB wrote on 8/13/2007, 1:37 PM

You might also try setting threads to 1 or 2.
A test using "Threads3r" on a Pentium 4, showed 2 threads being 12 times faster than 1,3 or 4 !! Very strange ...

mam wrote on 8/13/2007, 4:05 PM

I switched it to "2" and it still takes 30 to 45 minutes. Not that that's all that long, but I was accustomed to the 12 minutes and it has me baffled as to what changed all of a sudden. Thanks for the input. Hopefully a few more will put their 2 cents worth in!

Eugenia wrote on 8/13/2007, 4:07 PM

Can you please tell us exactly how you export each time? I mean, was the EXACT same setting you were exporting before you installed the new version? For what is worth, I find the WMV exporting of VMS very slow too, but I have no reference to v6.

mam wrote on 8/13/2007, 5:16 PM

I've always rendered with the Main Concept mpg2 template in Version 6 & I'm doing the same in Version 8.

I do have an update though. The one suggestion was to change my threads to how many cores I had. In the properties it was set to 4. I switched it to 2 in VMSP6 and there was no difference in rendering times, BUT, when I went back to VMSP 8 and switched the thread setting from 4 to 2 my rendering times dropped to about 16 minutes on the same files that I had previously rendered at 45 minutes. I have no idea if this has anything to do with the problem, maybe just a coincidence. Weird ... maybe a glass of Lambrusco would help :)

Eugenia wrote on 8/13/2007, 5:33 PM

It kinda makes sense. Multi-threaded code is difficult to develop and so you will see such major differences between versions of apps when changing the number of threads. On Vegas 6, when the app was not properly multithreaded, lost speed after you installed VMS8's set of encoders. But when tweaked the same threads on VMS8 you saw a speed up, because the app now "understands" multithreading better.

All this makes sense to me except one thing: supposedly Vegas installations don't overwrite older installations so you should not have seen a Vegas 6 slowdown.

ritsmer wrote on 8/13/2007, 11:18 PM

In another thread there has some discussion about having the source and the result from rendering on the same drive.

The conslusion is that when rendering to the same drive the rendertime is about twice the rendertime when rendering to another drive.
If you have only one physical harddisk then rendring from one partition to another (or to an USB stick) also gives this huge reduction in rendertime.

mam wrote on 8/14/2007, 5:55 AM

I have Vegas installed on my system drive (c) and all video files are rendered to my D drive (4 - 250gb drives listed as one). I'm about to head back to the studio for more video work, so I'll be keeping an eye on the rendering times today to see if I'm still back to my "quick times" of 15 - 20 minutes. I'll try and post my results this evening.

Thanks for the input everyone.

mickbadal wrote on 8/15/2007, 8:08 AM

To ritsmer's point, though, your C and D drives may actually be two partitions of the same physical drive (which contributes to a performance reduction), rather than two separate physical drives.

MSmart wrote on 8/15/2007, 9:54 AM

all video files are rendered to my D drive (4 - 250gb drives listed as one).

So your 4 drives give you 1TB storage or are they set up as a RAID array?

You say v6 now takes about the same time to render as v8, how much space do you have available on the D drive?

ADB wrote on 8/15/2007, 6:36 PM

"If you have only one physical harddisk then rendring from one partition to another (or to an USB stick) "

I tried rendering to a USB memory stick but the render time was actually a touch slower. Is there any setting that needs tweaking ?

mam wrote on 8/16/2007, 9:59 AM

My "D" drive is indeed 4 seperate 250 GB drives (1TB) and is setup as a RAID array. I have about 20% space left. Working on WAY too many projects at once.

And I'm happy to report that since re-setting my threads in both versions of VMSP (6 and 8) , my rendering times have dropped back down to 12 - 16 minutes. Works for me!

Thank you for the input folks, MUCH appreciated!