Rendering WMV files

bobmac wrote on 11/28/2001, 11:11 PM

We successfully made our first VCD disk with no trouble using VD 2.0. But when we try to render our movie in WMV 3 Mbps video format it comes out with many dropped frames.
We are using a P III 500 Ghz chip with 374 Mb RAM. Any advice on this one would be much appreciated.

Comments

bonze10 wrote on 11/29/2001, 6:00 PM

is your original source file(s) smaller than the output of the .wmv file? That would cause the dropped frames if thats the case...

HeeHee wrote on 11/30/2001, 9:04 AM

Three tips that may help.

1)Enabling DMA on the hard drive, if available, helps.
2)Make sure you have defragged your hard drive recently.
3)Use uncompressed video clips, like avi files, to create the un-rendered movie instead of a compressed clip like Mpeg.

SonyEPM wrote on 11/30/2001, 10:14 AM

There may be some confusion here: I believe the first poster is saying that there are dropped frames in the rendered 3mb .wmv file when that is played back in Media Player- is that correct?

Is it a matter of hiccuping playback in MP or are there actually missing frames in the render?

bonze10 wrote on 11/30/2001, 10:38 AM

good point. Media player used to do that to me for some unknown reason, now it plays files back fine...

SonyEPM wrote on 11/30/2001, 11:21 AM

If MP is having trouble playing the file back (hiccups/stuttering), it is a system performance issue. 3mb .wmv is pretty hefty and may not decode fast enough on slower computers.

Chienworks wrote on 11/30/2001, 1:21 PM

Rendering a video should never cause frame dropping problems no
matter how slow the computer is or how fragmented the drive is.
Rendering doesn't happen in real time, so it can take as much time as
it needs to process each frame. You can theoretically render a 3 hour
project on a 16MHz computer without losing any frames. True, it might
take a few years, but ....

If you are seeing sporadically dropped frames during playback of your
rendered file, then it is most likely the player that is having trouble
keeping up with the data stream. As with capturing video, playing it back
is a pretty processor intensive task too. Try to have as few other programs
running in the background as possible.

Of course, if your project's original files are 29.97 fps, and you render to
MPEG at 24 fps, then you will end up with less frames in the output. But
this isn't the same as dropped frames getting lost because the computer
couldn't keep up with the speed of the video data. Vegas will resample
the video to keep it running smoothly at the slower frame rate.