Comments

jrazz wrote on 6/29/2007, 5:41 PM
It depends on your system specs, but yes, magic bullet fx or other fx can really slow down the render time. If you have track motion in use or the opacity slider at less than 100% or a plethora of other variables your render time can be hours. I had a 23 minute piece take over 24 hours due to my extensive use of track 3d motion.

j razz
PeterVred wrote on 6/29/2007, 7:02 PM
Thanks jrazz,

I have absolutely nothing going on with this file, except for the "Bistro" Movie Look.
Not even sure what track motion is, never used it. I'm a very new and lite user of video.
The movie looks effect is really nice considering what the video looked like before.

Thanks for confirming.
jrazz wrote on 6/29/2007, 10:03 PM
A simple test to see if it is the fx you applied is to render a 5 second loop without the effect and then another 5 second loop with the effect. That should give you a pretty good idea.

j razz
Jay Gladwell wrote on 6/30/2007, 1:24 PM

Any "look" and/or effect you apply to your video causes each frame to be entirely re-rendered. The more frames, the more time it takes. It's a fact of life.


DJPadre wrote on 7/1/2007, 2:31 AM
If its MB2 though, u should expect realtime (at least) from an AGP 6800 GT/GS

One of the reasons i upgraded my GFX card was for this, bluffitler and Particle illusion and i havent looked back..

Doom3 rocks too.
DGates wrote on 7/2/2007, 4:00 AM
I love the Magic Bullet stuff, but use it sparingly because of the render time. Just 3 minutes of MB Movie Looks can take an hour to render, give or take.
DJPadre wrote on 7/2/2007, 6:33 AM
guys... u DONT HAVE TO WAIT THAT LONG TO RENDER... !!!!!

GEEZ

yeah i know a gfx card upgrade is a bit much for alot of people, but if u like a program THAT MUCH, its really REALLY worth the investment... Not jstu for MB2, but for otehr apps which use open GL off teh gard as well.. apps like bluftitler, after effects, particle illusion, alamdv, Ultra2, and pretty much any game thats released these days..

put it this way, i payed 150bux for teh MB2 upgrade (from memory.. it coulda been cheaper) and 270 for an nvidia 6800GS which has been unlocked.
The time (= money) i have saved has already paid itself off tenfold.

My only gripe is with the Misfire plugin, which is still single thread, BUT tve found an alternative solution to that by using the Virtualbbbdub pluginpack old movie filter.

But believe me when i say that it really is worth it in the longrun if u use this stuff on a day to day basis...

and like i said, doom3 absolutely kicks on it..
Peter Vred wrote on 7/2/2007, 9:16 AM
DJ,

I'm not up on this stuff, so you are saying the video card makes that big a difference?
I just bought a 6200 AGP, it's what I rendered this with.

Checking this morning, a 3-1/2 minute clip at mpeg-2 NTSC took a bit over 2 hours.

The difference in render time with a 6800 is that much better?
The cost isn't that much more.
Of course i'm sure all 6800s are not created equal.
Steve Mann wrote on 7/2/2007, 4:00 PM
"I'm not up on this stuff, so you are saying the video card makes that big a difference?
I just bought a 6200 AGP, it's what I rendered this with. "

Only with Magic Bullet and some other third-party software. It does not make a single iota of difference for Vegas itself.

Did you ever make the test render of a few minutes of your video with and without the movie effects?
DJPadre wrote on 7/2/2007, 6:15 PM
yes, teh nvidia and some of the higer end ATI cards DO accelerate rendering for the plugin, hwever, bare in mind that im refering to Magic Bullet 2, not v1. MB2 uses yoru gfx card to accelerate rendering. If u check their site, they ahve a list of comaptible cards which allow MB2 to take advantage of the HW.

As mentioned, the GFX card itself will not affect vegas performance whatsoever
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/3/2007, 5:25 AM
MB2 only supports Nvidia cards on Windows. On OS X it only supports ATI. Should be "fixed " in MB3 to support both card on both platforms. If you've got MB2 you can get GOOD Nvidia cards for ~$150 (better ATI cards for the same price too but won't help on Windows).

If there's a look on MB1/Movie Looks that you really really like but it's taking forever, try using color correction & a few FX. I took a video that looked great with some Movie Looks then duplicated it via color correction & it took ~2 hours to render instead of a day! Not bad! :D (DJ: hope to see you in some MP games every once in a while!)
2G wrote on 7/5/2007, 5:01 PM
You mentioned $150 for the MB upgrade. What does the upgrade give you over the freebie version shipped with Vegas? Does it give better render performance? What else do you get with it?

Also, I have an nVidia card. Not sure the model number, but it was only ~$100. So I suspect it doesn't have whatever you are talking about that improves rendering. What does "which has been unlocked" mean?

Jerry
DJPadre wrote on 7/5/2007, 7:04 PM
the nvidia 6800gs is the same physical chipset as the flagship 6800gt (AGP only) with the firmware being changed to accomodate a "cheaper" market. In turn with RivaTuner u can unlock several pipellines and unlock afew other features, making it about 10fps slower than the 6800GT. Bang for the buck is def there which is why i bought this card. its 256bit, 512mb ram

My laptop has an Nvidia Go7300 256mb 128bit BUT being PCIe i found it to run just as fast as my desktop. Also, preview is definately much faster than the desktop equivalent, in addition to HDV previews/renders being SLIGHTLY faster than its desktop buddy. By slightly were talking 5 to 10 seconds quicker per minute but it really depends on whch drives im rendering to and from

In regard to the upgrade, it actually allows u to thread the rendering through the GPU, in turn, the GPU does all teh hard work in regard to the filters used within MB2. Aside from speed, there is not much else thats different save from several presets
2G wrote on 7/5/2007, 8:41 PM
Thanks for the info... But please bear with me... I'm not into graphics card lingo (until now...) RivaTurner?? Unlock several pipelines?? Sorry, I'm not sure what you are talking about. Can you explain in layman's terms?

Thx.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/5/2007, 10:30 PM
http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/mbe2whatsnew.html

there's the MB info on v2. If you've got an nvidia card (post the card & we'll say how well it compares) then you'll get much better performance then w/o one (sad really as the nvidia 7xxx line is slower then the ati x1950 line & more expensive for the most part, but not supported until version 3 of MB).
2G wrote on 7/6/2007, 8:43 AM
I have a 7600GS card.

Would I get any render benefit at all with this card from buying the MB full package, or will it not use anything on this card?

Still have no clue what a RivaTuner is or what unlocking pipelines means....

Thx.
DJPadre wrote on 7/6/2007, 8:57 AM
the 7600gs is a PCIe card and physically doesnt have the same chipset as the AGP models.. the unlocking of teh pipelines is simply a hack in teh firmware which allows for access to elements of the card which were previously unlocked. RivaTuner is a tiny application which allows u to fulfil this hack procedure.
if u search "unlocking 6800GS" or "Rivatuner unlock 6800" youll find many tutorials onhow to do this..
If u have a PCIe gfx card, this wont make an iota of difference.. in fact i wouldnt recomeend it.
the hack is only for the AGP model

as it stands, MB2 will take advantge of your gfx card, as i defiantely know that on a 7300Go (laptop) it works a treat. the 7xxx series are PCI equivalents (from my understanding) of teh AGP6xxxx brothers
2G wrote on 8/18/2007, 8:17 PM
Followup to the this thread from a few weeks back....

Last week at the WEVA conference, i was fortunate enough to win a drawing for an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 card. I believe they said it was worth around $500. I know some people mentioned a couple of NVIDIA cards that had a GPU that the upgrade version of Magic Bullet Movie Looks would exploit for rendering. This card wasn't mentioned. Any idea whether this Quadro card will help MB Movie Looks?

2nd question... I went to the Red Giant web site to look for the upgrade. Found a link, but it's dead. Anybody know if it's still possible to upgrade the free MB to the paid version and get all the GPU support stuff? If so, any suggestions for finding a link that works? (I did a google search for Magic Bullet Movie Looks. The only link related to Vegas mentioned Vegas 5. That page is still there. But the upgrade link off of it fails.)

Thx.
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 8/19/2007, 12:21 AM
you've got to email/call them (don't remember if I did one or both) but that's the only way it worked for me, and they had some problem with upgrading it so I had to just get a fully new serial code number (course I did it with the one I got with my DVX). I use it here and there, but really the reelpaks from VASST are just as good IMO and i didn't have to do a hardware upgrade for that. So, if you're looking at options and you are not lucky enough to win a grafx card (congratulations by the way), then the Reelpaks all together cost about as much as the MB2 upgrade (by the sounds of it), and won't require a hardware upgrade for the technically unsavy.

just my .02

Dave