Vegas at a crawl??

blink3times wrote on 10/27/2008, 6:54 AM
Usually a 2 hour HDV time line with effects and a few overlays rendered out for bluray takes me about 5 hours to complete and cpu usage is close to 100% most of the time, but this time I'm doing something a bit different.

I captured with HDVsplit and set it up to title each clip with its original time code (as I usually do). But this time I have used "QuickLabels" in Excalibur to overlay each clip title (or in other words the time code for each clip) into the bottom left hand corner of each respective scene.... so my upper track is a small time code number in the bottom left and the lower 2 tracks being my video.

Now comes the render... I set this up as I normally do... no big changes here... standard blu ray template with a slight modification to the bitrate (I like 28M cbr)... but the render is now at a virtual crawl!!

For a 2 hour time line I'm looking at 20 hours render time and cpu usage is between 30 and 50%..... not even CLOSE to 100%

What's the difference here?

Comments

farss wrote on 10/27/2008, 7:17 AM
You're making Vegas do a lot more compositing.
Just why CPU utilization is low I haven't a clue but over the years I've seen the same thing too.
Why are you using QuickLabels, wouldn't just adding the TC FX achieve the same thing and probably be faster to render?

Bob.
blink3times wrote on 10/27/2008, 7:47 AM
Well I expected the render to be longer but what i did NOT expect was to see a drop in cpu usage to that extent.... it makes me quite curious to say the least.

Can TC fx stamp the actual date and time (year/month/day, hour/minute/second) of each scene? I didn't even look at that because I assumed it couldn't... am I wrong?

thanks.
farss wrote on 10/27/2008, 8:09 AM
No, TC FX is only that, Time Code, industry standard thingy.
Doesn't even give you tape / clip name which is the biggest pain in the butt.

CPU usage can indicate that disk system is slow, see that a lot myself. Something always has to be the slowest link in the chain. Also those CPU utilizaton figures aren't very accurate I believe. They're from how long the system spends in it's idle loop, I think.

Bob.


CorTed wrote on 10/27/2008, 9:06 AM
In my experience, the CPU usage (percentage you can view) goes down the more effects fades etc are being used.
Rendering staight HDV or AVI the CPU blazes at 100%, as soon as it encounters anythin else the CPU slows down.



Ted
blink3times wrote on 10/27/2008, 10:21 AM
Quite interesting. I guess that sort of ties in with what Bob says. With computer generated graphics or media there must be quite a bit more disk usage and such causing more of a bottleneck type scenario going on.

Well... I guess if I want the actual time/date stamp overlayed on each scene... then I'll have to put up with the additional render time. Not a killer in the long run i suppose.
CorTed wrote on 10/27/2008, 10:36 AM
And this is when I get into trouble regarding more frequent crashes.
The more effects, tracks, fades etc. you throw on the timeline, the closer you'll be at crashing the program during renders.

Ted
blink3times wrote on 10/27/2008, 12:01 PM
Well I don't crash on render... not anymore anyway. It USED to be so bad that I couldn't get more than a 3 minute render out before a crash. My heart used to go into my throat every time I was ready for render. But Vegas is now dead solid in that fashion for me. It's actually HARD to crash it now. It doesn't seem to matter what I put on the time line... vegas just plugs away at it until it's done.

I've actually done the above render once already. Took just a little under 20 hours and vegas did it without a single crash. Unfortunately there were a few things I didn't like about it and wanted to reimport and just fix those things up a little... but I rendered as a M2V which vegas can't import so I have to do the entire render again.3

That BTW is a little irritating too... vegas can WRITE a M2V but it can't import one... who thought that up?