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Mostly venting about rendering – 40+ hours for a 53-minute show
Thanks, everyone, for your help as I’ve popped in in recent months while I put together a TV series. I appreciate it.
It’s rendering season time. As in it’s time to render all the episodes for the broadcaster. Six eps at 53 minutes each. Destination is 1080i MXF at 35mbps.
I started this week with Episode 1, figuring I could knock them out at, what, 7 hours apiece and have the series ready to submit after the weekend.
First three attempts failed at various points with Vegas 12 needing to shut down. Once around 36%, another much later in the show.
The audio was going through three VST plugins, so I prerendered the audio to another track to eliminate those as a possible problem.
After seeing so many recommendations here to turn off the GPU acceleration, I shut that off, too, and started it rendering on Wednesday.
As of this (Friday) morning, it was still going. It rendered for so long, the Time Elapsed counter rolled over. It’s going on something like 40 hours or longer to render a 53-minute show.
My source material is AVC .mov files from a Canon camera, a bit of GoPro footage that’s been transcoded, and other material from a Sony pro camera. Some compositing with graphics and such. Most clips have at least one or two filters on them — Levels and some Color Match.
Master, as discussed, has Levels and Broadcast Colors on it.
It’s going to end up taking 48+ hrs to render a 53-minute show, CPU only. CPU is a first-gen i5 and it’s running between 60 and 90%. I have 12 gigs of RAM and the HD doesn’t appear to be any kind of bottleneck.
I don’t even know if I’m asking a question — I might just be twiddling my thumbs.
I do know that when it comes time to render the next one, I’m turning GPU acceleration back on. I don’t know if it’s supposed to apply in MXF rendering, but the renders (before crashes) were going way faster with it turned on than the painful speed I’ve seen this week.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
17 Replies
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You might try lowering the video quality slider off of the max. It has a dramatic effect of speed. Down to maybe half of that you most likely will not notice a quality loss, especially at your bitrates. I only did VERY brief tests of that so take it with a GRAM of salt. I only did that after reading it online.
Sony does not say what it does but certainly one thing is the motion search algorithm being used. If you know anything about the x264 encoder, then you probably know about some of the insanely slow ME algorithms that WILL find all motion but they are not worth the cost in encode time. They keep the options for those who do not care about time. I suspect at least one thing the slider is controlling is ME algorithm selection.
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[Scott Simpson] “CPU is a first-gen i5 and it’s running between 60 and 90%”
I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating. Core i3’s are for office/word processing, Core i5’s are for multi-media consumption, and Core i7’s are for multi-media creation. You really need to have a Core i7 to make your rendering go faster. There’s a reason the Core i5’s are cheaper. You are finding that out now. Under extreme load they don’t perform as well.
This comment is not aimed at you Scott, but I never understood how people could spend thousands and thousands of dollars on camera equipment and then skimp on their PC and software (because the difference between a Core i5 and Core i7 is only $130). So you have to ask yourself, would you pay $130 to have your renders go twice as fast or more? (‘cuz a 4-core i7 really is twice as fast as a 2-core i5 and a 6-core i7 is 3x faster)
You might want to look into buying a new computer if you are going to continue creating these episodes. I have a 6-core i7 and I have no problem with rendering anything I through at it. I don’t mean to rant but you need a beefy computer to work with AVC/MOV files.
Short of getting a more powerful CPU… Are you rendering in Best mode or Good mode? Best will take longer and Good will be the same quality if you are not changing the frame size so keep it at Good. Are you using 32-bit Pixel mode? This will increase render times. Use 8-bit unless you really need it. Stick with the default Sony templates. They are optimized. Make sure you didn’t alter the opacity of a track without knowing. This will cause compositing when you didn’t mean to and greatly increase render times.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Good tips there, John.
In some ways, there *is* resizing going on. A few small bits are SD upscaled (in Boris UpRez) to HD, but the whole project is being re-rez’d in a way, because it’s my footage is 1920×1080, but the render is to 1440×1080. But the Good vs Best change is a wise one, and I’m quite happy to settle for Good if it’ll speed things up.
Point taken on the i5 vs. i7. I bought the four-core i5 when they were first-generation, less than a year from release, I think. It was top of my budget at the time. The chips have gone through several iterations of improvements since then. My next CPU & mobo will *definitely* be i7. At the time I bought, I was doing a lot of audio and rather little video, and nothing in HD. I’d gladly empty my “audio video hobby” account right now if it would replace my PC tonight. In fact, I was at newegg earlier this afternoon taking a quick look at mobo/cpu/ram upgrade kits to see what it would cost.
8-bit pixel mode. Have never messed with 32 — heard more cautions than benefits for that.
Great tip on checking the track opacities. I recall seeing one of the nested files in one of the episodes had an (unused!) track with the opacity turned down a bit from an earlier time when I’d had a graphic logo ‘bug’ in the corner. I’m going to personally groom each one of these before hitting the next render.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
Great tip, and not something I would’ve thought of. Much appreciated.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
If your computer’s motherboard is Socket 1155 (i’m assuming this is a desktop and not a laptop), swap out the CPU for the most expensive i7 Ivy Bridge you can afford. It’ll help tremendously.
Dave
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After John’s notes on the CPU, I just did some looking around. My board is an Asus P7P55D-E — it’s an 1156. I’m running an i5-750. At this point, I’m best off replacing ………everything except the drives and case, probably.
My life is in a state at which I can’t take up PC part research as a new hobby. I’m going to have to live with it for now, or poke around at a local dealer and see if someone can make me a pitch on doing the upgrade for me so I can weigh the cost. I built this rig myself, but that was a few years ago before family and everything else that’s going on.
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
[Scott Simpson] ” I recall seeing one of the nested files in one of the episodes had an (unused!) track with the opacity turned down a bit from an earlier time when I’d had a graphic logo ‘bug’ in the corner.”
I’m guessing that you just found your problem. Here is the odd thing about Vegas Pro… empty video tracks affect render time! I couldn’t believe it until I measured it for myself but if you add an empty video track to the top of your project it will increase your render times. I’m guessing that the empty track with it’s opacity changed may have the negative results you are experiencing. Make sure you delete that one and let us know if that makes it render faster.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “. I’m guessing that the empty track with it’s opacity changed may have the negative results you are experiencing. “
That is were nice Audit tools like in Ultimate S or Vegasaur can help find quirky things like that.
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Ah! IIRC, I bought Ultimate S. Auditing time!
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Radio guy in a TV world. Bigasssuperstar.com -
[Scott Simpson] “My board is an Asus P7P55D-E — it’s an 1156. “
I might have an 1156, i7 860 CPU collecting dust somewhere.
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