I have the following suggestion to Sony which I posted in response to someone in another thread and which I thought would make a good topic by itself. Here it is:
Why not provide a small project that everyone could download and render using one of the various standard templates? This way, each person could know whether their system was somehow behaving "out of line."
Why is this needed?
Well, based on the dozens of questions that have been posted in the past months, lots of people worry that they have done something wrong that is causing their render times to skyrocket. The first thing they suspect is their computer setup (hardware, O/S, background operations, viruses, etc.).
Having a standard test that everyone could run would eliminate this problem. Run the test, compare the results to standard times (posted by other users) for your O/S and processor combination, and if you are within 10-20% of the same time, there is probably nothing radically wrong. On the other hand, if your render takes ten minutes and everyone else with a 2.3 MHz processor running XP reports two minutes, something is definitely going wrong.
I have a related suggestion. I strongly urge Sony to consider an idea I posted in the scripting forum a few days ago, namely providing a way to "audit" a project prior to rendering. It is just too darn easy to accidentally "nudge" the opacity setting, or the track level setting and end up needlessly re-rendering every frame. (There are other similar accidental settings that also cause abnormally long renders).
I have track level problems all the time because I use the Alt-arrow shortcuts to move back and forward through an event one frame at a time. However, if I have just clicked on the track header and forget to click back on the event, this keyboard combination changes the track level by 0.1%. This is too small to be visably noticed, but now every event on the track will have to be rendered, and the render time will be much longer. Admittedly, track levels are pretty easy to visually scan (event opacity is not), but without a built-in audit, I often forget to look. I envision a feature that could be turned on or off, much like the warnings given during a software compilation.
If there were an auditing feature that would give a summary of all non-default settings for each event and each track, this would avoid the problem. Such a summary, if properly done, could be scanned quickly, and problem areas quickly highlighted. You could even set limits so that only unlikely settings are highlighted (e.g., when was the last time you purposely set an event's opacity to 99%?).
Why not provide a small project that everyone could download and render using one of the various standard templates? This way, each person could know whether their system was somehow behaving "out of line."
Why is this needed?
Well, based on the dozens of questions that have been posted in the past months, lots of people worry that they have done something wrong that is causing their render times to skyrocket. The first thing they suspect is their computer setup (hardware, O/S, background operations, viruses, etc.).
Having a standard test that everyone could run would eliminate this problem. Run the test, compare the results to standard times (posted by other users) for your O/S and processor combination, and if you are within 10-20% of the same time, there is probably nothing radically wrong. On the other hand, if your render takes ten minutes and everyone else with a 2.3 MHz processor running XP reports two minutes, something is definitely going wrong.
I have a related suggestion. I strongly urge Sony to consider an idea I posted in the scripting forum a few days ago, namely providing a way to "audit" a project prior to rendering. It is just too darn easy to accidentally "nudge" the opacity setting, or the track level setting and end up needlessly re-rendering every frame. (There are other similar accidental settings that also cause abnormally long renders).
I have track level problems all the time because I use the Alt-arrow shortcuts to move back and forward through an event one frame at a time. However, if I have just clicked on the track header and forget to click back on the event, this keyboard combination changes the track level by 0.1%. This is too small to be visably noticed, but now every event on the track will have to be rendered, and the render time will be much longer. Admittedly, track levels are pretty easy to visually scan (event opacity is not), but without a built-in audit, I often forget to look. I envision a feature that could be turned on or off, much like the warnings given during a software compilation.
If there were an auditing feature that would give a summary of all non-default settings for each event and each track, this would avoid the problem. Such a summary, if properly done, could be scanned quickly, and problem areas quickly highlighted. You could even set limits so that only unlikely settings are highlighted (e.g., when was the last time you purposely set an event's opacity to 99%?).