Sort of insane render time!

jkrepner wrote on 1/18/2006, 1:13 PM
How on God's green earth can a 1 minute and 45 second timeline take 2 hours to render to a new track? (I'll admit, I haven't installed 6.0c yet - so maybe this has been fixed) Something just seems wrong and I'm hoping someone can help.

I have two 20 second events rendered from After Effects (as uncompressed AVI), some DV footage with quick masks drawn around them with smoothing set to both, there are gaussian blurs here and there that animate over time, a title that moves/zooms, and some gradient filters over the DV clips. During preview, I get well under 10 frames per second in the lowest preview setting (Draft Auto). There is nothing on the master video bus (no motion blur or supersampling). Started a new project to ensure there wasn't something accidentally left on on a video track. Task manager shows little processor activity (when not rendering) and there doesn't appear to be any errant executables running. Everything seems sluggish, including opening files within Vegas, clicking on buttons, and obviously the playback frame rate.

While not cutting edge anymore, the machine is still pretty good. It's a P4 3.0 with HT turned on, 1 gig of ram, 160GB video drive, 80GB system drive. I have render thread set to 4, and I'm using 800MB for the dynamic ram preview. It's only used as a video workstation, so there is no other junk installed. I only hop online with it on occasion to download patches and FTP video files. I don't have any antivirus apps installed on the computer, because normally I don't have it connected to the web, and I try to avoid AV programs because I feel they tend to slow things down. Could there be a virus? If that be the case, why would Vegas craw and AE work fine? (Well, I mean, for reasons other than the terrible render engine in Vegas.)

Edit: assuming it is the uncompressed AVIs from AE that are gooing things up in terms of preview, why would it take so long to render? You'd think it could pretty much change from format to format without much render overhead.

Sorry to vent. I'll try loading 6.0c to see if that improves thing. If not, there is always 5.0 to fall back on. I'm in the camp of people that saw render times increase with 6. (I know my people are still out there!!!)

-Jeff

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 1/18/2006, 1:20 PM
"I have two 20 second events rendered from After Effects (as uncompressed AVI), some DV footage with quick masks drawn around them with smoothing set to both, there are gaussian blurs here and there that animate over time, a title that moves/zooms, and some gradient filters over the DV clips."

I'm amazed you're rendering in only 2 hours. That's a LOT of extra stuff added in. Gaussian blurs are slow, moving titles are slow, gradient filters are slow. Add all that together and you are going to crawl.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/18/2006, 2:06 PM
It sounds like you created a render torture test. Without the masks and the gaussian blur it would render MUCH faster. I'm not suggesting you don't use these features, but just be aware that they take the most time to render.

You might find this information useful:

Results of render times for ALL Vegas fX
Laurence wrote on 1/18/2006, 2:26 PM
You're talking about an HDV render right? Render times like this are exactly why I wanted to up the quality (another thread - problem solved) of my SD proxy files in Gearshift so as to decrease rendering time when all I wanted was an SD DVD.
jkrepner wrote on 1/18/2006, 2:55 PM
No, not HDV - just plain Jane SD DV.

Render torture test? If you mean for me, the editor, then yes. It just finished and I realized the timing was off and will need to fix and re-render. Thank God I have some Russian Vodka stowed away next to the edit desk!

I am actually going to try and export the footage differently from After Effects, then ditch the Gaussian blur for a faster blur. Then I'm going to add 2 parts vodka, 1 part diet tonic water (need to watch the figure), mix and enjoy.

Thanks for the replies guys.

Jeff
fldave wrote on 1/18/2006, 3:51 PM
If you haven't started it yet, you should probably reduce the 800 dynamic ram preview to 128 or 256. You may be dumping all your rendering memory into your swap file. If you hear your hard drive spinning a lot during your render, that may be what is happening.

Just a thought.
Laurence wrote on 1/18/2006, 3:56 PM
I hadn't noticed that. One gig of RAM minus 800 meg for preview RAM means that Windows and Vegas are sharing just 200 meg. I'm amazed it's working at all! Yeah, drop your preview RAM way down for rendering. That or buy another gig of RAM!
JJKizak wrote on 1/18/2006, 4:33 PM
Don't worry about the ram thing. Set it to default (16) and you will be fine. Vegas uses what it needs.

JJK
jkrepner wrote on 1/18/2006, 5:35 PM
I'll give the RAM thing a try. I usually keep it around 16, but I had moved it up (not really understanding what it really does I guess) to 800 for RAM previews (shift+B) I think.

I'll give that a try once it finishes this render.

Thanks again!

Jeff
ReneH wrote on 1/18/2006, 5:50 PM
You outa check that any trojans or keyloggers are not turning on i the background. Those things get in the way.
rmack350 wrote on 1/18/2006, 9:18 PM
During editing a higher preview ram setting is fine, but you have to figure out what the cieling should be. You can watch taskmanager to see if your page file is growing - set preview ram too high and it will force Windows to start swapping, I think it will even start swapping your preview ram.

It has seemed to me that with a gig of ram, the preview setting maxes out around 700 MB. Set it to less than that for safety.

For renders, reduce the preview ram. I think t was fldave that posted some very good observations about render performance and ram preview settings.

Rob Mack
fldave wrote on 1/19/2006, 4:50 AM
Yes, for Vegas 6c, you should stay away from settings greater than zero and less than 128 for rendering. I found that 0 and 128 resulted in about the same render time, but 16 and 64 took a lot longer.

I would just set it to zero for final render on V6c.