New PC, only moderate speed improvement

osterac wrote on 6/16/2013, 11:44 PM

Hi,
I jost got a new PC based around an i7 4770k. My old PC had a q6600 clocked to 2.7Ghz, and it would render a 25 min 1080p XDCAM video with color correction and a 1072 pix vertical crop in about 5 hours. I tried the same job on my new PC, with an SSD this time, and got 1.5 hours. So a modest improvement, but I was sort of expecting more. Should it be faster? I was encoding to mainconcept MP4, basically the 1080p internet profile only with 10 Mbs and 1920x1072. I had a color correction, brightness and contrast, Gaussian blur, and crop filter on for the duration of the video. I've also tried rendering a segment of one of these videos with only a couple of audio tweaks made, vegas estimated 13 minutes for 1 minute of video - but that was from my spinning HDD.
Any tips on how to speed this up? I'm about to get a hard drive full of XDCAM footage to edit and upload, so the faster the better.
Thanks,
Allen

Comments

MSmart wrote on 6/17/2013, 12:34 AM

5 hours down to 1.5 is a "modest" improvement?

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Quad+Q6600+%40+2.40GHz

The 4770K is slightly faster than the 3770K but based on the graph's comparison, I'd say your render improvement is on par.

What PC model, may I ask? What graphic card does it have? I'm going to be building a DIY rig soon and am planning to use the 4770 (no K). I saw the Dell XPS 8700 is based on the 4770 so looking at that too.

Birk Binnard wrote on 6/17/2013, 1:35 PM

Just another point of reference - my i7-3770S @ 3.1GHz renders AVCHD video at about 2 times real time. This is with an nVidia GT-630 graphics card for GPU help.

osterac wrote on 6/17/2013, 3:31 PM

The system is home-built. It has an MSI z87-g45, a sandisk extreme 480 GB SSD, Nvidia GTX 560 (plan to upgrade to 770 gtx 4GB) 16GB g.skill sniper 1866 Mhz DDR3. The graph you linked to has the 4770k going 4x faster than the q6600, so according to that alone, I would be a little slow but not bad. However, there are other things to consider, like the SSD and various IO subsystem improvements. this is, after all, a computer 5 years newer than my last. As for GPU acceleration, I don't think it will be any faster when I upgrade to a 700 series part. I've seen CUDA rendering speed comparisons between an 8800GTX and a geforce titan and the render times were exactly the same.

I know 5 hours down to 1.5 sounds good, but with a computer like this, I was hoping to get close to 1x render times, at least when applying minimal effects - and when I did that and rendered a loop region, it was 13x (slower)..

musicvid10 wrote on 6/17/2013, 7:00 PM

"a 25 min 1080p XDCAM video with color correction and a 1072 pix vertical crop "

Your rendering times are fine. It is the filters causing the slowdown, not your system. Considering that you're resampling every pixel of every frame, you should be quite happy.

So if you leave the timeline alone, and do a straight render, same size, how does it do?

Markk655 wrote on 6/17/2013, 7:15 PM

Musicvid,

Right on (again).

I have a similar system (i7 3770K running at 4.2 GHz, NVIdia GTX650Ti with 16 GB RAM and an SSD and multiple internal SATA2 hard drives.

In short:
The GPU speeds up rendering by ~10% (with transitions and a couple of NB FX, but no serious colour correction). It is relatively consistent (~8-15% improvement).

Rendering to the SSD (or having the temp files go to the SSD) instead of the SATA2 HDDs) led to NO improvements in speed. Note that the controller and SSD are SATA3.

I render 1920x1080 AVCHD to AVCHD (Sony codec) in about 1:1.

In short, the processor is still the limiting factor as far as I can tell (and Movie Studio uses only ~70% of all the cores during render). It isn't the GPU, nor the SSD. I haven't tested the RAM (but that would be a surprise).

SUMMARY:
For those buying or building new computers, rendering speed = processor.

MSmart wrote on 6/17/2013, 7:42 PM

SUMMARY:

That's exactly what I've surmised while doing my research in preparation for my build. I'm not going to buy a GPU initially. The only thing I've changed is to go with a 4770 instead of the 3770K.

osterac wrote on 6/17/2013, 11:07 PM

I tried doing a straight render on a 1 minute clip and it took 2 min 53 sec.