Vegas Renderfarm in NYC?

dlion wrote on 9/21/2006, 8:29 AM
I have a 37-minute documentary film in 12 sections that I've edited with vegas. I'm now trying to render to uncompressed AVI - I've rendered 5 sections, but the render times for the rest are 16+ hours on my dualcore 3ghz w/2g ram. (movie looks, pan&zoom...)

Anyone know of a rental house in NYC where I can rent a powerhouse rendering machine that I can install Vegas on? Or, an editing suite I can rent that will be Vegas-friendly?

I I need to render 7 more sections to uncomp AVI, then combine them into a 37-minute veg file, then render that to WMV HD and WMV 320x240, and to mov 320x240.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Comments

apit34356 wrote on 9/21/2006, 10:46 AM
dlion, I would suggest rendering directly to WMV HD, since it appears to be no benefit in rendering to uncompressed AVI. You when can render WMV 320 from the HD file and the mov 320 format, also.
Jay Gladwell wrote on 9/21/2006, 10:48 AM

Why are you rendering to uncompressed AVI? It really isn't necessary.


dlion wrote on 9/21/2006, 1:54 PM
frequent crashes (access violation) when rendering to wmv format from m2t original. today, i rendered one segment to 320x240 wmv. looks great in windows media player. went back to do another, crash. same with 1440 wmv.

i tested rendering 5sec clips to both 320 and 1440 wmv from uncomp avi, and this worked. the image and audio quality in both cases was excellent.

perhaps on a different machine i'd be able to render to wmv directly. i have a dualcore 3mhz w/2g ram. rendering to a new usb2 500g seagate or 250g internal sata. same results. computer not connected to the internet.

thoughts?
DavidSinger wrote on 9/21/2006, 2:20 PM
Make sure your project parameters are 1440x1080i, even though you intend to go to something smaller. That one little step (I was setting project parameters to 720x480 because that was the target output thinking that setting would be 'better') drastically improved performance, and cut down on crashes. It was explained to me that when the project parameters are not exactly the same as the source footage, there is 'conversion-on-the-fly' for the preview screen.

Also, I ponied up $349 for the Acer AL2216W (22in 16:9, 5ms, 700/1 contrast) today. I set it for 1600x1050 as the second monitor (DVI), and dragged the preview screen to this second monitor. Even with the preview monitor set to 'BestFull' the system performs now at near-real-time until it hits some complicated areas.

Oh, and I have yet to install V7 (coming in the box next Monday), so this is on V6, which doesn't have the m2t power for the 40tracks and 100+clips I'm working with. I'm getting about a 1->10 ratio of realtime-to-rendertime. Athlon 64 4000+ and Raid0 for the target output on a Shuttle gamer's computer.

David
Jayster wrote on 9/21/2006, 2:32 PM
Regardless of the crashes, it seems clear why he would want to render to an avi. The "rendering" part (with movie looks, pan&zoom), is the most time and CPU intensive. He should only want to do this once. Encoding times for his 3 different distribution types should be small compared to render time.

Personally I would suggest using the Cineform format for the avi. It's quality is great, and it's not nearly as demanding as an uncompressed AVI (file size is greatly smaller, to say the least). Unless of course you are needing an alpha channel for your segments (which you didn't say). Also the cineform codec is pretty efficient these days for memory management, so maybe you are less likely to get a crash. And do this render in the same output size as your .m2ts. With no resizing, you won't have to use the "best" setting in the render, which should dramatically decrease render times.

You would then use the "best" setting when encoding (with resizing) to your distribution format, but this can be a lot less time intensive because it is only an encode. If you have Cineform's HD Connect, you can do resizing from their HD Link application too (maybe faster than from Vegas, but I haven't tried it nor can I comment about resizing quality from HD Connect).