Slower than grass growing!!!

dara wrote on 9/20/2004, 9:50 PM

Please someone help. VV has been steadily slowing in the last couple wks and I don't know why. here's what I do know:

proj. that used to take 1 hr to render are now taking 4-6 hrs. (and we're only talking 80mb at most)

I have plenty of memory and plenty of ram

I have no spyware

loaded windows service pack 2 a cpl wks ago

had "comp. guy" take a look at it and he saw nothing out of the ordinary.

ANY ideas????
thanks

Comments

jaegersing wrote on 9/20/2004, 10:06 PM

1. "VV has been steadily slowing in the last couple wks"

2. "loaded windows service pack 2 a cpl wks ago"

3. "ANY ideas????"

It couldn't be related to service pack 2 then?

Richard Hunter

dara wrote on 9/20/2004, 10:19 PM

of course I'm suspicous--read on here that others had no probs w/ service pack.....
D

galt wrote on 9/20/2004, 10:20 PM

I have been warned that SP2 has "lots of issues", like every other SP microsoft releases. SP2's always seem the worst, because SP1 is critical fixes and they try to add new features in SP2. Then SP3 and 4 fix the new features.

But you may want to try defragmenting your drive. Service Packs make a mess of the disk, and of course a defrag can only help somewhat. WHat is really needed is an ability to offload and reload the whole disk, so that directories are not fragmented as well as files. SO if you are sure you can live with SP2, delete all the rollback directories and then defrag it. You should see some improvement. But maybe not. :(

johnmeyer wrote on 9/20/2004, 10:33 PM

A 4x increase in render times is unlikely to be from disk defragmentation.

To solve the problem, try a few tests. First, take 1-2 minutes of DV AVI video, put it on the timeline, and "render" it to a DV AVI file. This should do nothing more than copy the file. If you render to a disk that is physically separate from the disk that contains the input video, the "render" should take place in under a minute (you didn't post the speed of your computer, but I assume it is over 2 GHz.).

I would then try encoding this file to an MPEG-2 file, using the DVD Architect NTSC template (or PAL). This should finish in about 1.5x real-time for a moderately fast computer, which would be 2-3 minutes. Finally, you can download the old render test from the Sundance site, and compre your times to those that other people have posted:

Render Test

Apollo25 wrote on 9/20/2004, 11:51 PM

The busier your work with regard to edits, special effects, pans and crops etc. the longer the render times.

dara wrote on 9/21/2004, 7:26 AM

thanks all. johnmeyre--I will try those things.

the thing about it is--the complexity in my projects hasn't changed that much. in fact-the project that reacently took the longest (6hrs) was super stripped dwn.

yes I have over 2GH

Laurence wrote on 9/21/2004, 7:35 AM

I recently had long render times when my hard disc was getting fuller. The strange thing is that I still had lot's of hard disc space left (maybe 10 gig), but it was a big disc and the percentage of free space left was low. My theory (and that's all it is) is that as the disc is spinning around and your data tries to write to where-ever the heads happen to be, if the disc is a large percentage full, it won't be able to write to where it lands on the first, second or maybe third try. Thus even with a ten or eleven gig free, all these false attempts really slow things down. Again, I'm not sure that this is what's happening, but I do know that when I replaced my hard drive with two 250 gig drives so that I'd always be sure to have lots of space, render times went back to normal.