rendering stutters

pen wrote on 3/12/2003, 4:40 AM

Hi knowledgeable VF users, -
I have recently puchased VF 2.0, also have 2.0C upgrade. I successfully captured footage from JVC DV cam, (...after I had a new 60 GB hard drive installed...). I edited for days and nights, and got to the rendering point. With heart in hands, I tried rendering a test portion (30 sec) only to get 1 in 20-odd frames rendering, ie the movie stutters really badly.
I have a PIII , 900- odd thingumy processor speed (sorry dont know actual specifics), 265 RAM, C drive 20 GB and new, second D drive 60 GB, rapid speed drive- (700 odd thingumies- sorry vague on these details also.)Both drives are IDE enabled.
I uninstalled and re-installed VF after the new HD was added, becuase it was working really badly, but since then it seemed to run well and capture well.
The project is many short clips (av 30 sec each) with at least 2 filters per clip (couldnt use any additional lighting when filming), so I expect it to be hefty (ie 800mb / 30 sec)and slow to render. I was hoping it would actually be able to easily render a short segment, though.
The only other bit of info is the project format is PAL DV, the render format is AVI (I had no other choices in the drop-down menu) and render template is DV-PAL. I would like to output to DV tape...

Does anyone have any information or advice?
Also- are these templates the correct ones? I am not sure how much compression one can use with a DV tape output? I need high quality image for projecting..

PS- otherwise so far I am very impressed with VF's functions. Gotta love the filters!!
cheers from the southern hemisphere, Pen

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 3/12/2003, 6:42 AM

Pen,

Capture and render and really time-critical tasks that require total cooperation of your PC. Most PC’s are not that cooperative at first. I see from your other post that you’ve already visited www.videoguys.com/WinME_Tweaks.html and I assume have applied them. Especially setting up a permanent swap file. You might want to render to AVI files first and then use the capture utility to play them back to tape. Some people have had good success with that when they couldn’t render from the timeline. Have you eliminated all background tasks? These are the TSR’s that WinME_Tweaks talks about. A program like EndItAll2 will also help identify and close those processes that you don’t need.

Why is this important? I had my computer all tweaked out and working great for video. Then one day I started dropping frames. I couldn’t figure out what went wrong or what changed. Then I remembered I had purchased a scanner and the scanner installed a little utility that installs in the system tray and monitors the buttons on the scanner and how long the lamp has been on to shut it off. Well it decided to do its checking right in the middle of a capture and interrupted my capture enough to make it drop frames. I killed the utility and had no more dropped frames.

Then one day it started happening again. I instantly started going though the software I had installed lately and much to my surprise, I digital camera graphics program installed a USB monitor to check if I placed a SmartMedia card in my USB drive. You guessed it, it polls every so many seconds and that’s when I had dropped frames.

So in the spirit of making your PC more user friendly to you, there are hundreds of programs that want to monitor everything you do. Unfortunately, these programs will interrupt time-critical tasks like capture and render to tape. Get a copy of EndItAll2 and kill everything it will let you. (Don’t worry its smart enough to not kill things that are important). Also disable your virus software’s auto-protection just while you capture to print to tape. Get rid of anything that may start a background task while your trying to render to tape. Good luck,

~jr

IanG wrote on 3/12/2003, 7:07 AM

Are your drives DMA enabled? It could be the rendering's fine but you can't read the disk quickly enough to view your results. That said, I'm not optimistic, because I'd have expected problems with the video capture, too. Still....

Ian G.

pen wrote on 3/13/2003, 4:58 AM

Hi JohnnyRoy,
Thanks for this info. I downloaded enditall2 (quite a spanky little program- beats Cont-Alt-Del), closed off just about everything, and still no luck. I tried to render 15 secs, and got most of the first 2 seconds, then 4 or 5 frames from there until the last frame. I did try just rendering to the D drive rather than onwards to the camera, but still no good.
Ill try again with everything possible shut down (based on your advice above).
You mentioned the permanent swap file. I didnt do the tweak for this one becuase it looked a bit tricky, but Im desperate enough to do this one now also...
One final thing- I am a bit unsure of the best project and rendering format. What is the difference between avi. and DVPAL?
Thanks again,
Pen

JohnnyRoy wrote on 3/13/2003, 5:25 AM

The permanent swap file is probably one of the most important tweaks. It actually may be your problem. If you let Windows dynamically create a swap file it will stop everything as soon as it runs out of virtual memory and start allocating more space. In the mean time you are dropping frames because no body told your camera we were taking a little break while Windows does some house cleaning. I would venture to guess that making a permanent swap file that is at least 2 times you memory (2.5x if you have the disk space) might fix your problem.

On your second question: AVI is a file format that can hold lots of different formats of video. DVPAL is a specific video format that you can place in an AVI file or MOV (Quicktime) file etc. So AVI is just a container for storing video. DVPAL says that what’s in the container is 720x576 resolution at 25 fps (frames per second) as opposed to DVNTSC which is 720x480 at 29.97 fps as opposed to any other video format that can be rendered.

~jr

pen wrote on 3/15/2003, 4:26 PM

Hi J-R and all,
Can report successful rendering of 3 minute project! I used "EndItAll" to end it all, replaced cordless keybooard/ mouse with old cord variety, uninstalled every program other than VF and ME. Now all I have to do is tinker to find out what the problem was...
Thanks for your help,- I am now a happy video editing camper.
cheers, Pen

JohnnyRoy wrote on 3/16/2003, 12:38 AM

Glad you got it working. :)

~jr