Nested Veg with Output FX

fldave wrote on 8/13/2006, 6:09 PM
Most of you probably know I love nested Vegs. Very handy tool. I have a render running right now that has me puzzled. 3.5 hours to get to 10%, but it says 3.5 hours remaining. At 1% I calculated it would take 33 hours. The timeline length is 1 min 8 sec. I don't worry about long renders as long is it does a good job. This is kind of out of the ordinary, though. Obviously the remaining time calculation is way off. At least I am expecting 30 hours render.

This is the first time I have used FX on the Preview window (output FX?). Since this is my first time to use output FX, I'm thinking there may be something incompatible with nesting. Machine is 3.2 Ghz Pentium, 2GB RAM. CPU is at 50% (HT: 1 cpu 100%, other mostly picking up the slack). Don't remember my last Dynamic Ram setting, probably 512MB, as I was previewing lots of HDV.

Here is my Veg chain. All HDV 1080i/Best, I'm actually rendering to m2t 1080i for print to tape archive:

Veg1:
video timeline1-m2t with mask
video timeline2-avi background (Cineform HDV)

Veg2:
video timeline1-Veg1 + color curves on track (may be other crap, don't remember :)
preview/output fx = broadcast colors

Veg3:
video timeline1-Veg2, 3 times to 1:08 length

The preview window looks gorgeous, I don't want to touch it until it's done.

Any thoughts re. Output FX and Nesting?

Edited:
Clarification: I may be naming the FX method incorrectly. I dropped the broadcast colors FX on the preview window, instead of the timeline or media on the timeline.

Comments

jrazz wrote on 8/13/2006, 6:26 PM
I've had vegs with color correction, 3d track motion, etc take up to 24 hours on a similar spec'd system and it only being 45 seconds worth of footage. I don't know what the difference would be in dropping the effect on the timeline or dropping it on the preview window as long as it is being added to the media in the encode, it should take the same amount of time.
I found too that dropping a veg on a timeline with major effects added or track motion will definitely slow down the render.
Out of curiosity, has anybody rendered a veg and then compared it to the same veg just nested inside another? I wonder if it would take any longer to render?
Also, I found that the Vegas Countdown does not reflect accurate render times - so definitely do not go by that!

j razz
fldave wrote on 8/13/2006, 8:45 PM
I just encountered the 24-hour bug!
My render now says 8hrs 20 min so far, 22+ hours to go. About what I calculated.

Still the long render issue. I've used these FXs before, just not any on the Preview window. Seems extraordinarily long for a 1 minute timeline.
fldave wrote on 8/14/2006, 6:22 PM
Semi-OT:

30 hours into my render, I have 38 minutes left. We just had a bad thunderstorm, and more rapidly coming my way. Arrgggh.

Anybody daisy chain UPS's successfully? I have two extras I can plug into the render PC's UPS.
johnmeyer wrote on 8/14/2006, 9:04 PM
Anybody daisy chain UPS's successfully?

Tried once -- as I remember it didn't work.

Turn off the monitor and everything else connected to the UPS.
grh wrote on 8/15/2006, 7:20 PM
> Out of curiosity, has anybody rendered a veg and then compared it to the same
> veg just nested inside another? I wonder if it would take any longer to render?

I have. IMO It makes no difference in the time. If I know that I'll be re-rendering bits and pieces, I generate intermediate AVIs and use those to put together the final project.

Also, I ran into a nested .veg bug last year, where audio tracks weren't consistently and properly translated from the nested file to the final output. Mis-burned and delivered 40 DVDs before I caught the problem and forced Vegas to re-gen and re-render the .ac3 file. They are a wonderful feature, but I don't trust them any more, and pay attention to every detail, both audio and video, when I use them.
fldave wrote on 8/15/2006, 8:35 PM
Thanks for the audio tip grh.

If anyone cares for an update, here is why this thing took so long to render. Heavy color curves and masking on the lowest level veg. That veg was used multiple times in the second veg. Final veg had 2nd veg with broadcast colors (I had another veg with Studio RGB to Computer RGB applied to 2nd veg).

I tried moving the color curves up to level 2, but no change in render time. The only thing that sped it up was to render the lowest level masking/overlay veg to a Cineform avi. Then it all rendered in 50 minutes. Versus 30+ hours. I need to do some testing to compare the quality of the two to see if it is worth the time savings.
grh wrote on 8/16/2006, 11:24 AM
> That veg was used multiple times in the second veg.

That's an excellent reason against using nested files _in_your_scenario_. You're asking the computer to do the same work over and over and over. An intermediate uncompressed file should (generally) provide equivalent results in much less time (as you discovered).