30 hours to Render a 58 minute Video

[Dave Haynie]

You can EASILY get long render times by doing complex things. Years back (and on a much weaker PC), I found the best looking PAL conversion I could get from an NTSC source was via Vegas, with supersampling and a few other things enabled. It took 8 days to render two hours (and that was SD), and I’m not sure how much all that was necessary. But I did get PAL that looked better than any of the dedicated PAL converters of the day (all of which pretty much just did a 3:2 pulldown, then boosted the frame rate by 1fps). So it was worth it.

In more recent times, I managed to take up several days of much faster computer time rendering a few hours of video through the Neat Video de-noising plug-in. Again, a long time, but very definitely worth the effort.

So my first question: any plug-ins we ought to know about?

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

I agree here. I’ve done a bunch of tests. IN THEORY, at least based on the original documentation, preview RAM would be entirely a waste during a render. The main point of preview RAM is for RAM previews. That’s it.

In practice, at least in more recent versions of Vegas, it’s clearly being used for buffering during a render. But it can’t be used for the render itself. I have found that 1GB vs. nothing is going to keep my renders much closer to 100%. That makes some sense — if Vegas is grabbing large blocks from your source drives all at once, that’ll be much faster than multiple short reads, just the nature of hard drives. But like the study Steven quoted, I have not seen 2GB make any difference.

And while it’s tempting to set up lots of memory when you have lots of memory (I have 16GB as well), I have never seen a difference at render time between 1GB and 2GB. And yeah, if you devote more memory to RAM preview, Vegas will allocate more memory, and that will be unavailable to anything else. It sounds like you told Vegas to take nearly all your memory for RAM preview, forcing your system to run mostly out of virtual memory, paging to disc like crazy on a system that should never have had to page at all for such a render.

-Dave

[Scott Gifford]

Hi Dave, I believe I resolved the issue with the help of Stephen Mann. Before I started the project I decided to upgrade to Vegas 11. When Vegas installed it has an automatic default which looks at the amount of Ram in your computer then assigns the entire amount to Ram Preview. Under Options/Preference/Video/ram preview. So I had all 16 GB of ram assigned to ram preview. According to Stephen Mann, this situation did not allow any ram to be used for rendering. (thank you Stephen). I then created a highlight reel from the same timeline, duration 20 min. I set the ram preview to 1000 mb. It took about 50 mins to render the video. PS. I managed to complete my project yesterday with a Fed Ex delivery today in time for thanksgiving. My stress level has returned to normal, although I may not live as old as I want too.

Scott Gifford
Scott Gifford Studios

[Firdaus Aziz]

Stephen Mann,

Thanks for highlighting about the preview RAM issue. As someone totally new to NLE and interested in Sony Vegas Pro, this kinda info is really valuable.

Is there any other settings like this that usually caught us newbie off guard?

[Scott Gifford]

Things to do before a project. Set your project properties to match media settings.It is very simple to do. Open Project Properties from the File tab and on the top right click on the film strip icon. This is the match footage dialog box. You then select a piece of footage from the project. Now your project is set up to work smoothly for editing.

Another thing I like to do is go to your preference tab and select the General tab. Carefully look at all items and check off the items you want to change. I like to check off the make spacebar and F12 Play/Pause instead of Play/Stop. I also unchecked the first item; auto open last project on start up. If my last project was large, it will take a minute or so to load up and it might not be the project I want. One last item. In preferences tab go to VST Effects. Be sure to locate your VST effects folder so Vegas can use those plugins. That’s it for now, Cheers Scott

Scott Gifford
Scott Gifford Studios

[Ellen Leggett]

Hi everyone, sorry for posting in an old forum, but I couldn’t find a better place for this (I am still very new to Creative Cow).
I have a rendering problem with Vegas Pro 13.
I have 1 hour 10 mins worth of GoPro footage that I wanted to render in Vegas at internet 720p bit rate of 8,000,000. I didn’t need beautiful quality because it was a B roll for a school project. I wanted to render the whole project in hopes that the compression would allow me to place the new video file into a separate Vegas project for editing and I could delete the original GoPro MP4’s to free up some space.

I started rendering one day and saw that it was going to take 5 hours, so i cancelled it, knowing that i had more use for my laptop in those 5 hours. So last night I set it to render, I asked my dad how I could make it small without sacrificing all of the quality and he said to reduce the bit rate and work with less than 1080p. I rendered at 24fps.

I set it to render overnight and changed my power settings so that the computer wold never go to sleep. It said it was going to take 8 hours, which is way long, but i thought, well, I’ll be asleep, now worries then.
I wake up this morning, expecting a fully rendered file, only to find that after 14+ hours of elapsed time it was only at 13%!!! and that it still had another 18 hours to go, which seemed too small considering 14 hours only got 13 % done.

I looked around and found this forum on CC, cancelled the render and checked my ram preview settings, which were only set to 200MB with 2958MB as max available. I have 4GB ram, and my computer is only barely there when it comes to system requirements on most of my software, but I’ve gotten used to little to no ram previews in AE, much better in vegas. I have an i7 core CPU on an Asus airbook.

Rendering has always been a pain, and I try to avoid doing it unnecessarily.

Could anyone tell me what going on? I don’t have much experience in vegas, are my render settings at fault? I have rendered on this computer before, but much smaller projects and never with render times as big.

sorry for the huge post. Your help is greatly appreciated. 🙂

[Ellen Leggett]

here are some screen shots of my render settings and custom settings

[Dave Haynie]

Hi Ellen-

From your description of the case, I think you may be running low on RAM during the render. I would recommend at least 8GB memory for any high definition work, though of course if you’re rendering to 720p, that uses roughly half the memory for the render engine, but just as much to decide your source material.

When you have too little memory in your system, the PC uses virtual memory to make up the difference. This means chunks of memory go to and from the hard drive during the render, slowing down your system dramatically.

One way to check this is to run the system monitor on the resources tab and watch your CPU and memory use. On a “happy” system, you should see each core of the CPU (you will see either 4 or 8 with a laptop i7) running around 90% — more is better. You can also see “real” and “virtual” memory use… real is the good stuff. Lots of virtual memory actuvity and you will be slowing way, way down… RAM memory is 1000x faster than disc storage.

Hope I didn’t overload you on the tech stuff!

-Dave

[Wayne Waag]

Ellen

In my view, it’s unlikely that you have a PC problem. It’s probably this.

he said to reduce the bit rate and work with less than 1080p. I rendered at 24fps.

You changed the frame rate to 24 which means you are doing a frame rate conversion from either 30 or 60 fps to 24 which will be very time consuming and also look pretty terrible, especially if you have not disabled resampling. You need to make sure that first, your media files and project settings are in sync. E.g. if your Gopro footage is 1080 30P, then your project settings should be the same. You can always render at 720p, but keep your project settings the same. If your media is 60P and you want to render at 30P, make sure that you have disabled smart re-sampling for all of your events. Then, Vegas will simply drop every other frame and not re-sample which takes a lot of time, plus looks pretty bad.

You have a pretty decent laptop (i7) and it should render very quickly, unless you’ve added lots of effects. In fact, it should be pretty close to real-time.

If you are still having problems, suggest you provide a screen shot of your GoPro footage information using MediaInfo.

wwaag

[Ellen Leggett]

Thanks so much for getting back to me so quickly.
I will try disabling re-sampling and try rendering with the source frame rate, 30fps, at 720p. I will let you know how it turns out second try 🙂
Thanks again.