My experience was much slower than 30% of mpeg2

engineeringnerd wrote on 12/6/2007, 1:52 AM

I ran multiple times of converting from .m2t to .wmv and other formats. Rendering a 4:30 segment .wmv to 8MBps took around 23 - 28 minutes versus about 8 - 10 minutes for .mpeg2 @ HDV. I ran it on two different machines, 4 different operating systems, and two different versions of VMSP (7 & 8) with similar results.

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 12/6/2007, 2:12 AM

Why did you start a new thread?? There was already a thread discussing EXACTLY this issue started by you. Us Vegas users are here to help, not to get spammed with duplicates and create confusion to other users. So, please don't start new threads again for the same topics.

As I said earlier, the WMV encoder is slower because it's mpeg4-based. Mpeg2 is an older technology, much more understood, and therefore much more optimized. Plus, the HDV codec is designed to get encoded fast, so this saves battery life on camcorders. If you don't like WMV and the features it brings (smaller filesize for the same quality), don't use it. That's the price you have to pay: slower encodings. It's the same for h.264 btw, it's not as slow as WMV, but it's much slower than HDV too.

Or, write a support email to Sony and ask them to license a better encoder. Tell them that you paid money for this application and you want the best of the best.

There is nothing else that can be said about this on this forum. There is absolutely nothing that you can "tweak" to automagically get a faster encoding.

Tim L wrote on 12/6/2007, 9:29 AM

Eugenia... relax... close your eyes and imagine a happy place... :-)

I think Engineeringnerd is responding to your assertion from the other thread "It is definitely not 1/4 the speed of mpeg2 btw. Maybe about 30% slower, but not 300%."

His experience is that the WMV render is taking nearly 3 times as long as MPEG2 HDV. You pretty strongly insinuated that couldn't be true. (And I don't have any info on it either way...)

Re: Starting a new thread -- it's awfully easy to do by accident -- to click "post new topic" rather than "reply". And even if intentional -- no need to bark at him. (I still don't understand why a "Post New Topic" link appears at the bottom of the page when viewing a thread -- seems like starting a new topic should only be on the main page.)

"Us Vegas users are here to help" Well stated. I couldn't agree more.

Just repeat as needed: "Serenity now." :-)

Tim L

Eugenia wrote on 12/6/2007, 12:56 PM

Well, for me it ain't that slow. But then again, I never encode back to tape and I have a multi-threaded CPU. I encode in h.264 for my PS3 and the HDTV, and compared to h.264, WMV is not that much slower. Besides, most of my footage is so much color graded, that the actual encoder is not the bottleneck, Magic Bullet is.

I explained to him that HDV codec is made so it's fast to encode in the first place, and it's an old codec for that matter. He should have replied on the previous post instead of starting a new one. That's what really pissed me off, not his claims. I do believe him that HDV is faster -- it is normal to be faster. But I don't like spamming.

engineeringnerd wrote on 12/6/2007, 4:24 PM

Eugenia,

I hit the wrong button; late evening and a new forum format (for me). I'll be more careful in the future. Your reaction is a little extreme, however. Spamming usually insinuates indiscriminate mass mailings. Please chalk this one up to an inadvertent newbie mistake.

Thanks to people like yourself the forum is helpful and as I learn the search routine it has a lot of valuable information. I feel comfortable that my machine is doing what it can do and I'll look to see if someone makes an improvement in the .wmv processing or if another format offers a better mix for my needs. I like the small size of the .wmv files and the fact that the windows machines work really well with it. Until I find a better solution I'll just do most of my rendering overnight.

Thanks again

Chienworks wrote on 12/6/2007, 5:24 PM

I used to use WMV a lot. Recently i've switched to DivX when i need small files. I do use a slightly higher bit rate with DivX than with WMV, but the quality is markedly better. For example, for web video i was using 256Kbps WMV and i now use 300Kbps DivX. The resulting DivX file looks way better than WMV at 600Kbps. The other bonus is that DivX rendering seems about 60 or 70% faster than WMV.

engineeringnerd wrote on 12/7/2007, 4:11 AM

Thanks for the tip on DivX; I'm out of town at the moment but when I get back I'll look at my VMSP8 and see what options it has for DivX. The idea of rendering being 70% faster sounds really good. I imagine, however, that DivX isn't as ubiquitous as .wmv in the business world which may pose a problem for my audience.

My biggest need is to produce professional looking shorts (training aids, announcements....) for xferring over the internet to a lot of people that may have 0 - 4 year old PC's.

4eyes wrote on 12/7/2007, 6:29 AM

There is nothing else that can be said about this on this forum. There is absolutely nothing that you can "tweak" to automagically get a faster encoding. I switched to using Windows Movie Maker 6. On a Q6600 quad when encoding to one of it's default HD-WMV templates the program uses all 4 cores at about 80%cpu usage. I didn't time the difference between VMS/Vegas or WMM6 but it is faster. Main reason I'm using WMM6 is the hd-wmv files it creates are compliant with their specs and playback without problems on Xine, VLC (win & linux). Also on one of my consumer hd-wmv players (the biggest reason).
My player is very picky, to get the correct buffer settings in VMS/Vegas is very time consuming. The videos produced by WMM6 work perfect.
For WMM6 I had to have the codecs installed on the system to read transport stream video files.

engineeringnerd wrote on 12/7/2007, 1:44 PM

Its always interesting to see how others "skin the cat" different ways. Thanks for the input, I may look into MM6 to see what it offers as well as seeing if I can adjust the buffer better on wmsp.