Poor CPU usage on VideoFX

Sebaz wrote on 6/30/2010, 3:36 PM
I'm doing a motion menu for a wedding in Vegas, with six animated thumbnails, which means six video tracks scaled down and distributed in the screen, along with six text tracks. The video thumbnail tracks have a chain of track video effects to make it look more like old sepia film, including color cuves, levels, black and white, sepia, film effects and film grain. Obviously since this is applied to each video thumbnail, it will take a lot more time to render than if it was just one, but what I don't understand is why my CPU is using only between 23 and 28% for the render. I spent a lot of money upgrading my system, so I'm definitely not happy about having to wait 2 hours to render one minute and ten seconds of a composition that is heavy, but still could be rendering much faster if these filters were taking advantage properly of the six cores and speed of my CPU.

Is there anything in the internal preferences that can be adjusted for this to work better?

Comments

Former user wrote on 6/30/2010, 3:47 PM
I would think the harddrive would be the bottleneck here. You are accessing six video tracks, reading and writing. Just a guess on my part though.

Dave T2
JohnnyRoy wrote on 6/30/2010, 3:54 PM
> The video thumbnail tracks have a chain of track video effects to make it look more like old sepia film, including color cuves, levels, black and white, sepia, film effects and film grain.

The Sony Film Effects plug-in is not multi-threaded and therefore the entire FX chain will be single-threaded and only use one CPU. All of the other FX in the chain, Levels, Color Curves, Black & White, Sepia, and Film Gain, are all multi-threaded. There is nothing you can do about it other than remove Sony Film Effects from the chain and do without it or purchase something like NewBlue FX Film Effects which are all multi-threaded. The NewBlue Film Pro effect with the "Oldie" preset should do everything that entire chain is doing and do it a lot faster.

~jr
Former user wrote on 6/30/2010, 6:13 PM
JohnnyRoy's answer makes more sense than mine.

Dave T2
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/30/2010, 6:24 PM
there's actually quite a bit you can do w/o purchasing anything new. Use multiple instances of Vegas, one for each thumbnail you want to render, to do render a new file with all the FX, then you put those in a master project & make your menu. :)

Don't forget you can manually assign each instance of Vegas a separate core via the processes - set affinity option. :) Just uncheck the cores you don't want it to use & then you can spread your CPU power around.
Sebaz wrote on 6/30/2010, 7:20 PM
That's a good idea. However, what I already started doing is rendering again the 6 video thumbnails of about 1:30 minutes each, but instead of rendering them at 1920x1080-60i, I'm rendering the loops at 498x280 (the actual size of the thumbnail) at 23.98 fps, which is going to be the frame rate for the scenes menu. That way on the Scenes Menu project I will not have to scale six different 1920x1080 tracks, and it should reduce the rendering time.
Sebaz wrote on 7/1/2010, 12:03 PM
@TheHappyFriar

After I tried my way and it didn't work as well as I though, I gave your idea a try. Turns out it works pretty good, although it's rather painintheasstic to setup six different projects, but setting each Vegas instance to one core via the affinity option doesn't really speed up or slower the render, it's about the same. Still, it's going up to 90 %, so it's much better than rendering just one project.
Chienworks wrote on 7/1/2010, 2:41 PM
It may not increase the rendering speed, but do keep in mind that you're doing 6 of them simultaneously so you should get them all done in a much shorter time, all together.