New render speed...what am I doing wrong?

smashguy37 wrote on 10/5/2009, 4:47 AM
Last month I bought a Q9550 and I've finally gotten around to rendering something out I need on DVD. The project is very simple -- a few titles at the beginning (basic text) and then a single cam angle running for about 50 minutes, no cuts, just some chapter markers and the FX I have applied are that Mike Crash noise reduction, colour correction and levels.

The render is taking longer than my old Pentium D.

I left it overnight and 9 hours later it was only at 37%. I haven't run a full test of the footage with no FX, but a quick start of a render shows it flying through at a speed I would expect. I output this same thing to DVD a month or two ago and I'm certain the render didn't take so long with those 3 FX. Is there anything I can tweak to improve my situation? I also came across those render test's on this board, but I can't open them (because I'm V6?).

Here are some quick specs...related to Vegas anyway --

Sony Vegas 6
Intel Q9550 2.6gHz
2GB RAM

And my video hard drive is a 500GB Caviar black -- I also have a raw tape drive (nearly full, for backup purposes mainly) that is a 1TB WD Caviar Black, but running the tape for the render off my video drive or the raw tape doesn't seem to change speed.

I checked my ASUS software I use to control my CPU fan and when I initally started rendering all 4 cores hit nearly full. I checked an hour later and they seemed to be really low (20% area some of them).

I would really like to get this outputted for my clients so short of waiting 3 days for it render, any help is appreciated.

Comments

smashguy37 wrote on 10/5/2009, 4:48 AM
I'd also like to add that this is 4:3 DV footage.
Former user wrote on 10/5/2009, 6:15 AM
Is there a possibility the CPU is overheating and slowing itself down?

Dave T2
rs170a wrote on 10/5/2009, 6:20 AM
Make sure you didn't accidentally bump the Video Level control in the Track Header area or lower the Opacity of the video clip itself as both of these will drastically affect render times.

Mike
smashguy37 wrote on 10/5/2009, 6:47 AM
No, the CPU is fine.

I think I figured it out...sort of. I tried removing all FX and everything and it still rendered slowly. I copied everything to a new project file and boom, all of the sudden it renders faster. It's been nearly an hour and it's at 70%, which is good as far as I'm concerned.

I don't believe I did anything weird with the last sequence -- opacity, weird project settings or anything like that. No idea. Thanks guys.
johnmeyer wrote on 10/5/2009, 8:47 AM
Send me your VEG file and I can probably find the cause.

As for expecting faster renders, I doubt you'll see much difference.

I don't think Vegas 6 makes much use of multi-cores, and the dirty little secret in the personal computer industry is that our computers ceased getting any faster about six years ago.

What? That surely isn't true.

Well yes and no. The clock speeds stalled out around 3 GHz many years ago. So, all speed improvements have come from all sorts of parallelism, most notably multiple cores. However, if the software task cannot be split among those parallel paths, you don't get any improvement. MPEG-2 renders don't make very good use of multiple cores even in 8.0c (the latest version that I have used).

So, compared to my six-year-old 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, which didn't even have multi-threading, much less multi-cores, I saw very little speed improvement for many, many tasks when I bought my "ultimate" 3.2 GHz Intel Core i7 computer. However, for those software apps that take full advantage of the multiple cores, the speed improvement is stunning.

Since Vegas is a mish-mosh of code, some that has been upgraded and some which has not, you will see amazing improvements in some things (but only if you have a later version of Vegas), and no improvement whatsoever in other things.
Laurence wrote on 10/5/2009, 9:01 AM
Did you maybe inadvertently change the compositing mode to 3D Source Alpha? I did this once because I needed it for a few seconds of a title and the render time became just ridiculous. After a couple of days I canceled the render maybe 30% of the way through!
smashguy37 wrote on 10/5/2009, 1:00 PM
I realize Vegas doesn't take full advantage of cores, or graphic card acceleration. I'm still using V6, but am not sure going to 8 (or is 9 now?) is worth it yet. Either way, I'm still content with the time it took to properly render today, compared to my Pentium D. I'm sure my new case helps, but I can render away full power without my system getting killer hot.

Anyway, I think Laurence got it right. I just checked Track Motion because I remember playing with it for something as a test a while back and sure enough it was left on 3D Source Alpha. Thanks everyone.