MPEG-2 RENDERING IS VERY SLOW

CaptainVideo wrote on 9/12/2008, 6:32 AM

I've captured a 20-minute b&w vhs video to my pc hard drive as mpeg-2, did a fade-in, then added 6 markers, brightness/contrast & median plug-ins, then a fade-out without splitting the file. A rendering to mpeg-2 matching input took almost five hours. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong?

Comments

OhMyGosh wrote on 9/12/2008, 10:44 AM

Hi Captain,
For a more accurate answer, it would probably help if you posted your computer specs. Good luck. Cin

Terry Esslinger wrote on 9/12/2008, 11:36 AM

If you were going to do editing on the clip, why did you capyure it as MPEG2?

CaptainVideo wrote on 9/12/2008, 1:04 PM

XP Pro SP2
DuoCore 8400 @3.0 GHz
3 Gig RAM
NVidia 8600 GTS
Creative X-Fi Sound Card
500 Gig SATA HD
1-Samsung DVD Burner
&
1-Samsung CD Burner
A VHS Recorder connected to an external DVD Express DX2 USB Capture device currently set to MPEG-2 720x480 in order to match the rendering settings for VMS.
I'm capturing only VHS tapes at this time.

Eugenia wrote on 9/12/2008, 1:47 PM

YES, what you see is normal. Remove all these plugins and redo the encoding and you will see how much faster it is. Median plugins are very heavy, the rest too.

CaptainVideo wrote on 9/12/2008, 2:34 PM

Thanks Eugenia,

I'll live with long rendering times...the SONY plug-ins are very effective. I especially like the Median filter on a low setting for cleaning up vhs noise.

Chienworks wrote on 9/12/2008, 6:17 PM

Yep, the median filter is the killer; extremely slow compared to most other filters & effects. But, if it helps, use it. Nothing wrong with letting your renders run overnight.

You're gaining no benefit by capturing MPEG2 to match the render settings. You'd get better quality and faster rendering times if you captured to some sort of AVI like DV or uncompressed. Capturing to MPEG2 compresses the data severely. Running it through filters and rendering to MPEG2 again decompresses and recompresses. This degrades the image a lot more and takes time.

CaptainVideo wrote on 9/14/2008, 8:54 AM

Hi Chienworks,

My USB device connectetd to a vhs deck allows only DVD & SVCD(MPEG-2), CD(MPEG-1), & DivX(MPEG-4) captures.