This Render Time Can't be Right

Lanzaedit wrote on 5/1/2004, 9:35 AM
As a test, I added a crossfade (Two seconds) to the beginning and end of a thirty second clip. When PTT, it's taking about six minutes to render. No other effects added...positive. I've searched the archives...I'm using the DV Template.

Side question: If I render that clip and then save & close the project, will that clip have to rendered the next time I want to PTT?

John


Comments

Liam_Vegas wrote on 5/1/2004, 9:41 AM
To appropriately answer your question (about your shock at the time to render for PTT) we of course will need to know your system specs (CPU etc). This sort of thing is entirely dependant on your CPU etc.

If you render the clip Vegas will not automagically do anything with it just by saving and closing the project. You either have to "render to new track" or load the rendered AVI back onto the timeline to replace the portion that you rendered previously.

This is actually a common workflow. You gradually render the portions of the project you have finsihed on and at the end you have a fully rendered timeline. At that point you just mute the original tracks leaving your "rendered" tracks "active". From there you can either do a final render to get it into a single AVI file (which will be a quick bit-copy as nothing actually needs to be rendered) or you can PTT direct from the timeline (which will require the audio portion is rendered to W64 format... but that is very quick).
Lanzaedit wrote on 5/1/2004, 10:03 AM
Liam wrote:
"we of course will need to know your system specs (CPU etc). "

3.06, Asus MB, 1Gig Ram.

John
Liam_Vegas wrote on 5/1/2004, 10:47 AM
OK. That does sound extreme. Doing a simple cross-fade would take hardly any time on that fast a system. BUT.. what is the source for the original clips? Are they DV or something else?

Were my other suggestions of ANY use?

Also... you mention the PTT is taking about 6 minutes to render. You didn't mention how long your project is? Although PTT from the timeline will not render the actual frames it does (I believe) render the audio to a a format called W64. So if your project is quite long then you would expect some time would be required to render the audio.
Lanzaedit wrote on 5/1/2004, 6:36 PM
All of the raw DV footage was captured to an external firewire hard drive. It was captured as individual segments (rehearsal, wedding, departure). Now after editing each segment individually, I want to PTT each segment individually.

I have edited the two camera shoot of the wedding, deleting some areas and adding dissolves (crossfades). No color correction or any other effects. To render the ceremony segment, I selected all events on the one necessary video & two audio tracks.The twenty-five minute segment has been rendering for five hours, and it shows nine hours remaining.

It is rendering as a new track. As a new user (who has already tried to find the answer in the archives), I hope someone will show me the way.

John
farss wrote on 5/1/2004, 7:54 PM
Render times are totally dependant on system speed and we still don't have any clue as to what that is!!

However if you don't have nay FXs applied over the entire project then it shouldn't take that long. Check to see that you haven't bumped a track composite level slider, very easy to do and that'll cause the enture track to be rendered which will take forever.
Lanzaedit wrote on 5/1/2004, 8:33 PM
Farss wrote:
"Render times are totally dependant on system speed and we still don't have any clue as to what that is!!"

3.06, ASUS MB, 1 Gig Ram

John
VegasVidKid wrote on 5/1/2004, 8:42 PM
Eventually, someone will mention this, so it may as well be me; make sure that your opacity is at 100% for the clip (unless there's a fade in or out at the ends).
Liam_Vegas wrote on 5/1/2004, 9:09 PM
Just as a check. Take one of your clips... unmodified in any way... and render that to a new AVI using the exact same project settings. It should by rights require no rendering and result in a bit copy only. If you find it says it will take 10 minutes to render a 1 minute segment then you know there is something that you need to check about your project settings or the original footage being not quite the format you are expecting.

The other suggestions of checking the opacity sliders are also very worth checking.

Good luck.
farss wrote on 5/1/2004, 9:10 PM
Think I already did,
on the system he seems to have render times should be WAY faster than what he's getting. Only issue could be I think he's rendering from an extermal USB drive.
Could I suggest you bring a small protion of video into a local drive, add a fade at each end and see how long that takes to render to local drive also.

CPU is plenty fast enough so its got to be either something screwed up or the USB drive is very slow. You could try looking to CPU utilisation during render, if the CPU seems to be idling along while rendering any FXs then time to look at the drive. If the CPU is at 100% during non FX renders hmm, maybe something else is gobbling up CPU cycles.

And one last thought, the project properties match those of the video? You're not inadvertently trying to render NTSC to PAL, that'd sure slow things down!
stormstereo wrote on 5/1/2004, 9:30 PM
Yes indeed, opacity in the Track header OR on the Event seem to be the most common "mistake". Also check if you've dropped any FX on the preview window AKA the Video Bus. That will affect the whole project. Hmmm, what else...check if there's any FX on the track header.
Best/Tommy
Lanzaedit wrote on 5/2/2004, 5:25 AM
Farss wrote:
"Only issue could be I think he's rendering from an extermal USB drive."

The video is on an external firewire drive.
Should I bring it in to the internal drive first?

John

farss wrote on 5/2/2004, 6:08 AM
Firewire drives are usually pretty fast but you never know, sure worth while trying that out. Also there's a render test .veg on the Sundance site, sorry don't have a direct link but do a search here for Render Test, I know it's been posted several times.
Lanzaedit wrote on 5/2/2004, 1:06 PM
I checked the fomat on the files of the external hard drive.
They are .wmv files. Is that the problem that's causing the very long render times?

A different clip that I digitized to my internal hard drive from my camera saved as an avi. I took a small clip of that and rendered to a new track without any problems.

John
farss wrote on 5/2/2004, 2:05 PM
WMV files will take a lot of processing to render, in fact you may find that many of them will not even open properly in Vegas.
WMV is an OUTPUT format. It's not designed to be edited in general. Same goes for mpeg.
Liam_Vegas wrote on 5/2/2004, 2:49 PM
Yes... finally.. it is nice to have the answer. Just goes to show that none of us should assume anything here. [edit] in fact I just noticed that my second post to this thread did indeed have the exact question on what the source clips actually were... if that question were answered at the time we would have all seen the answer a lot sooner

The native format for Vegas is DV not WMV, RM, uncompressed AVI or anything else. Going to/from any other format or re-rendering a WMV file as another WMV file will require substantially more CPU than working with unmodified DV AVI.

When you made your statement about not "doing anything" else with your video I erroneously assumed we were talking about DV AVI files that you had captured yourself.
Lanzaedit wrote on 5/2/2004, 3:22 PM
Am I better off re-digitizing the footage myself...
or can I convert the already-digitized .wmv's to .avi's?

John
Liam_Vegas wrote on 5/2/2004, 3:54 PM
If you have the original tapes.. and they are from a DV camera... yes.. re-digitize them as you will never get the same quality otherwise.