43 hours exporting to Encore?!

[Harm Millaard]

Why did you scale to 102%. Is that the whole time line or just a single image? What were your quality settings and encoding choices, CBR or 2-pass VBR, audio settings, etc.

The PC is pretty weak, but 43 hours seems rather long.

Harm Millaard

[Jon Barrie]

Are you working in HDV? HD? SD?
Your system isn’t that strong – increasing the size of clips to 102 is extremely uncommon practice, it won’t give you that much more than what you see at 100%. That’s making the computer work hard to calculate. Colour correction will make it work hard too if you have done a lot of it. 90 mins of this will push the system to the brink. I’m surprised it’s stayed stable. I find exporting to directly to Encore actually takes longer than just making an MPEG-2 then importing it into Encore.
Once you’ve done the encoding Encore only needs to setup the author, the encoding will only happen to things that aren’t encoded – Like a Menu or other clips in avi or mov format.
HD, HDV will take a long time to render too – without having to handle changes, colour corrections, etc.
– If you are going down to SD from HD/V I suggest you make an avi version 1st. That won’t take so long to export then make the MPEG.
This is why Hardware companies make money, this stuff on big scales happens in RT with Cards such as Matrox Axio.
– Jon

[David Alfonso]

Harm,

The scaling to 102% is for the entire time line. We do this commonly in the Avid to get rid of wide blanking. When watching on a regular “old” TV set the black borders are usually beyond the scan, but with full raster displays – as in computer screens and newer LCD sets – the black borders, often of different sizes, become annoying.

I’ll reply to the rest of your comments in my reply to Jon.

Thank you. At this point any input is helpful.

[David Alfonso]

Jon,

It’s all SD. Regarding the size increase to 102% – I just explained it in my reply to Harm. If you know of any other way to get rid of wide blanking, or what appears to be wide blanking, let me know. The material wasn’t shot by us; it happens so often I’m beginning to think it can’t all be sloppy blanking setups.

The color correction is actually a slight change in gamma since most of the footage (a ballet) is a tad dark.

“I find exporting to directly to Encore actually takes longer than just making an MPEG-2 then importing it into Encore.”

Thanks, a very good suggestion. I usually work with Avid, but I’ve found Premiere a lot easier to work with when I’m dealing with footage that’s to be rendered for DVD. Although I’ve had Premiere for years, I’ve seldom used it. But with CS3 it becomes a lot more useful. I must admit I’m a novice when it comes to Premiere, hence my search for answers.

Thank you for all your suggestions. I have another job after this one that requires nothing. With that one I’m going straight to Encore. 🙂

“90 mins of this will push the system to the brink. I’m surprised it’s stayed stable.”

I know, and it has been the cause of one sleepless night. The Dell is a fairly reliable laptop, with Centrino Duo and 2 gigs of RAM it should be. By the way, we use Matrox cards on our big systems.

[George Socka]

Never tried one this long, but from experience rendering an mpeg file frst is preferable because any hiccup in encore will lose the intermediate render ( I believe there is an checkmark option somewhere to save it but I could never find it. You don’t want to do your 40 hours 2 or three times.

[Jeff Brown]

I’d say the wide blanking is from an analog source, and part of the format. BetaSP perhaps?
Are you by any chance using the “reduce noise” filter? I find that kills Premiere pretty well, even on a fast machine.

-jeff

[David Alfonso]

Try 40 hours times two! I came home tonight expecting to find the entire video transfered to mpeg for Encore; instead I found the start of the second pass – another 37 hours to go with only 10% completed. I had assumed, based on prior experience with two pass rendering, that the second pass would be considerably shorter. What exactly is going on here?! If I cancel the transfer at this point, will the first pass yield anything?

[David Alfonso]

Jeff,

The wide blanking is indeed from an analog source. We shot some stuff on P2 last week, let’s see how that comes out.

Yes, I am using the noise reduction filter. I guess in trying to do as good a transfer as possible, I worked myself into a corner and now I have no idea what to do. Should I cancel the transfer and go right to Encore? Will the transcoding be faster there?

Arggggh!!!

[David Alfonso]

Jon,

Do you care to chime in regarding my unexpectedly long second pass? If I cancel now will I have something to work with? Would going straight to Encore be faster in the long run? Waiting another 37 hours is really absurd. Nearly four days to transfer 1h25m of material is REALLY unacceptable. I have never experienced such long rendering times. (Read my other replies for a full explanation.)

[Jon Barrie]

DO NOT STOP THE RENDER. YOU WILL LOSE EVERYTHING! 1st PASS WILL NOT BE SAVED ANYWHERE!

2nd pass will take about the same time as the 1st in my experience, at about 90mins the time it guesses will be about the same, might get shorter as it goes on, but that will take a long time to get there.

If you want to remove any nasties or imbalanced black edging why don’t you try to cover it will a psd file over the top of the whole timeline. That will clean it up. I find LCD still cuts off some edge like “old” CRT TV. Make the edges even and if someone has a cheap TV that shifts the image, stuff them. That’s their problem not yours. Web stuff will look okay with a black trim. The size increase is killing your poodie. A Laptop is not made for rendering, esp a Duo. You need a core2duo at least to do serious chip based rendering. A P4 3.4 Desktop would roughly equate to the low end rendering speeds of a mid ranged Core2duo.
– Jon