Rendering speed - PC or software issue?

Summersond wrote on 11/1/2001, 10:03 AM

I have a pentium III - 500 MHZ intel with 768MB ram and win98SE. I am considering upgrading to 800 MHZ CPU so my rendering will be faster. Is this a Videofactory 2 software issue, or would I be helped by a faster CPU? The software is great to use, but the big drag is the time it takes to render a project.

thanks in advance,
dave

Comments

wvg wrote on 11/1/2001, 11:10 AM

Going from 500 Mhz to 800 Mhz will help... but not that much. I went from 400 Mhz to 1200 Mhz and for sure it is much faster, but still rendering is painfully slow. For me, it still is anywhere from 3-to 8 to 1 ratio depending on what format and what filtering you use. So a 30 minute video still can takes hours to render. Aside from using hardware compression (very expensive) rendering is a slow process because it consumes many CPU cycles.

The slowness isn't limited to VF, just about all applications take a very long time. Some are faster than VF, but none are "fast" relatively speaking.

rwsjr wrote on 11/1/2001, 11:15 AM

You won't see any appreciable benefit that upgrade. I used to be able to render videos on my P-133. It's faster not with my current system but it takes a long time to render reguardless of what you use.

My advice: Render when you sleep or when you are doing something away from the computer.

Summersond wrote on 11/1/2001, 11:47 AM

Thanks for both of your responses! I kind of figured that may be the answer but wanted to make sure before I went out and pd for the upgrade. I may hold off for awhile now and start it before bedtime. :)
dave

Chienworks wrote on 11/1/2001, 5:46 PM

I agree with the other responses pretty much. You won't really "feel"
the increase in speed unless you at least triple your processor speed.
Wait until the 1.5GHz machines drop a lot more in price (which will be
soon).

One thing i used to do was start several projects rendering all at once,
then go to bed and then work the next day, and they'd be done the next
evening. Unfortunately, i just discovered that VideoFactory 2 doesn't
let you do this anymore. It only lets you run one instance at a time.
Grrrrrrrrr.

danimal wrote on 11/2/2001, 12:18 AM

Video Factory is definitely slower than other software. wvg's 3-8:1 or so ratio isn't kidding. I've found that if you're simply editing video and outputting back to the same format, it's as fast as can be. But as soon as you try to render to another format, it draaaags. For example, converting a DV clip to wmv that takes a few hours on VideoFactory, is done in only an hour or two at the most in Windows Movie Maker. One possible reason for this is VF doesn't take any advantage of multiple CPUs (I have a 2 x P3-933 system) whereas WMM does. Even free tools like VirtualDub can smoke VF in head to head renders. But, I love the VF editing tools, so generall I just use several different tools to get a job done.
What you could try is editing your video in VF, outputting back to the same format so that it's doing pretty much a direct stream copy (except for sections where you may have an FX setup that it has to render), then using something like VirtualDub, WMM or TempGenc to convert to the final format that you originally wanted.

Something in VF's rendering pipeline just is not optimized very well at all, somewhere before data is given to the codecs.

mike10670 wrote on 11/2/2001, 12:31 AM

Here is my two cents: I copy from my digital video camera. The video clips are large. I do my editing and then save them back to DV format under a different file name. For a 10 minute clip, saving back to the same format only takes a few minutes. Then, I delete the original clip if I am done with it. After I have edited all the videos I want to render, I use TMPGEnc to batch render all my AVIs that I created. I start the batch before I go to bed, and when I get home from work the next day, they are usually done.

I am going to get a dual processor motherboard soon. TMPGEnc is able to take advantage of a dual processor. I will be going from a single 650 to a dual Athalon 1700+. I am hoping to reduce my rendering time by many hours.

Beginner wrote on 11/5/2001, 3:30 PM

Well, here's my 2 cents as well (hehe) No matter how fast your CPU is 1700+, 2000+, 3000+, AMD Athlon, Intel Pentium, Overclocked, Underclocked, All the cooling in the world, the rendering time wont change dramatically. If the only reason why you are upgrading to a faster CPU is to lessen rendering time for your videos, then you are drastically wasting your money. If you have other applications that might benefit from a faster CPU, then youre ok. You see, we have reached a point of diminishing returns within the high tech computer chip industry. CPU speeds are phenomenal these days and blazingly fast. So fast that you have to ask yourself, do I really need it???With all the sensitivity issues of faster CPU's i.e. the 1.2 gigahetz (which I use), and the 1.5 gighahertz, its hardly worht the frustration. A 500 meghahertz is really all you need for rendering effectively. Once you go beyond that, beware of system instability issues. High end CPU's are very sensitive. Im running a AMD Athlon 1.2 gig with 256K of PC2100 DDR memory (Crucial Technologies) and have no problem whatsoever with rendering, however, I really dont think my old Intel Pentium lll 700 would have made a whole lot of difference.