rendering performance

cgarrett wrote on 10/18/2004, 5:36 PM

i have a 2 and 1/2 minute piece of film to render. it consists of 20 tracks with 30 short events per track (600 events).

i am attempting to render this project on a p4 2.6 ghz machine with 1gig of ram running xp pro. all indications are that vegas takes about 50% of cpu usage while having this machine dedicated to rendering the project.

to render this project takes 27 hours! quite a substantial amount of time for 3 minutes of film?

is there any way to speed this process? selectively rendering tracks? somehow assigning more cpu usage via vegas or the os?

any help would be most appreciated.

Comments

busterkeaton wrote on 10/18/2004, 6:12 PM

It might not help now, but for this kind of project, you can work with mulitiple instances of Vegas and set one to render one section of the project while you continue editing in another instance.

20 tracks of video is a lot and effects can add time too.

What effects are you using? 3D and "change-every-pixel" effects like blurs seem to be the most time consuming.

Are you editing all DV sources on the timeline? Are you outputing to DV? Any transcoding will also take extra time.

handleyj wrote on 10/18/2004, 8:31 PM

Another thing that may be a factor here is HyperThreading. I suspect you have HT enabled, and thus Windows sees your CPU as two CPUs. And thus the load only shows as 50%, which is 100% divided by two. I know this is weird, I'd rather see a number that was greater than 100%, but the way it works is to show half the load (instead of double).

cgarrett wrote on 10/18/2004, 8:44 PM

thanks for the advice...

what do mean by "editing all dv sources on the timeline"? i am rendering to .avi. is it quicker to render directly to an output device like a dv camcorder? is this what you mean by "outputing to dv"?

thanks again.

busterkeaton wrote on 10/18/2004, 10:46 PM

"all dv sources on the timeline"

I was asking if you mixing your source material. Such as putting .avi, .mpg, .jpeg, .gif, etc on your timeline which would increase your render times since Vegas would have to make it all .avi first. Rendering to avi is faster than transcoding.

Even if you go out to a DV camcorder, Vegas would have to make it all an avi source before printing it to tape. .avi is the windows file format for DV.

Do you have separate hard drives for your OS/programs and your video data?

Why don't you tell us more about your project. Are you using 20 tracks of video because you are doing heavy compositing? If you don't need all 20 tracks at once, you could probably come up with a workflow where each section of your project only requires 4-5 tracks. You could open up separate instances of Vegas to render those and do a final render where you put all the pieces together. I bet you can find some efficiences there.

What effects are you using? Color correction? Multiple picture in picture?

tadpole wrote on 10/19/2004, 9:21 PM

20 tracks with 30 events each for a 2.5 minute video???

Unless you're creating a piece to show at LCD/shroom users seminar.. only other thing i can think you might be doing is, maybe creating a 'video wall'.. like 5 tvs in a row, stacked 4 levels high? = 20 tracks?

If this is the case.. or really, any case when you're doing something really complex.. is build in CHUNKS.. (chunks rule! btw) then composite all the chunks on a master. (by chunks i mean in seperate segements, like say track 1 [rendered to avi file] is chunk 1, track 2 [again, rendered to avi file] is chunk 2.. ect )

I can't say if rendering effects 1 track at a time then all together, would be faster then - errr less time consuming - then rendering all 20 at once.. but, i would think it would be ... regardless... i know for a fact - if you render 20 tracks at once and then you realize something is messed up in say track 15.... ur hating life.

Vegas will have to re-render all effects/transitions on all 20 tracks along with compositing overhead.... as opposed to time spent re-rendering only track 15 then compositing together with the other fully rendered tracks.