Explanation for Long Render?

[Jeff Schroeder]

It may be related to the “render crawl” problem. See these two posts.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/934930#934934

and

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/24/935491#935504

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Curt Charles]

Thanks. I increased preview RAM to 8000 for this project, but forgot to reduce it prior to render. I’ll drop it to something tiny like 16 and re-render the project – there’s a small problem to fix, not worth an 11-hour render but certainly worth a 90-minute render.

So memory reserved for RAM preview isn’t available to the long “render” process?

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Stephen Mann]

All of the F/X you applied will require every pixel on every frame to be re-encoded. Especially the zoom and rotate. You didn’t say what the length of your project is, but the render time looks about right.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Jeff Schroeder]

I don’t know how they manage RAM, I don’t even know if the problem still exists. I seldom use dynamic RAM, even though I have plenty of it. I hope this helped.

Jeff

2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64

[Curt Charles]

Thanks, Jeff and Stephen. I reset the preview RAM buffer to 0 but it made no difference – after 8 hours of rendering it still indicates 6 more hours are needed; I suspect the forecast is overly long.

Lesson learned: get it right during capture!

The project is a choir concert with a dozen songs. I think next time I’ll render each song independently, then hook them together in DVD architect.

Vegas really needs “suspend” and “resume” functions during rendering; at least that would allow checking e-mail.

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Stephen Mann]

[Curt Charles] “Vegas really needs “suspend” and “resume” functions during rendering; at least that would allow checking e-mail.”

I agree, but not for the same reasons. I don’t know why you can’t read emails while Vegas is encoding your project, I do it all the time. OH WAIT – I don’t have email on my editing PC, I use another PC that is connected to the web.

Snide remark aside – seriously, if you plan to do a lot of video work, get a dedicated PC for that. (Or buy a cheap, dual-core PC for your web and email use). But, I still don’t see why you can’t do other tasks while encoding (the menu item says “rendering”, but unless you are making uncompressed AVI files, you are encoding).

If I read your original post correctly, you are using an i7 PC, so it should multitask with no problem. RAID is overkill and you really don’t need it (unless you are encoding 4K uncompressed video, but that would put you into the elite minority). You would get much, much more performance improvement by using a separate hard drive for your video materials.

You can also sacrifice speed for faster multi-task use by going through the Task Manager to lower the priority of Vegas. Occasionally, I will set the priority to “realtime” to help really long encodes, but while it’s not really “realtime” because the program still goes to Windows O/S for housekeeping, but other programs will appear to be hung. It might drop a ten hour encode to 9.5 hours.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Curt Charles]

Thanks, Stephen.

We’re not a full-time production house, so the video PC is also the bill-paying PC, e-mail PC, still editing PC, etc. Perhaps we need to change that…

The PC has 3 disks: C: is for Windows, apps, office documents, e-mail PSTs, etc., D: is mostly for stills, and L: is a SATA RAID pair at 7200 RPM used exclusively for video. The RAID pair is configured for redundancy, not performance, and I’m clearly nowhere near disk bound. Is that what you mean by a dedicated video disk?

(I even have the machine on a UPS to ensure that nuisance dropouts don’t impact me.)

I’m confident that I could multitask on the machine but I’m very reluctant to interrupt Vegas while it’s working. It crashes enough without interruption. If others have had good luck, then I’m willing to give it a try.

I have noticed that all 8 threads run at about 70% load during renders, so it’s keeping the CPU very busy indeed.

Great suggestion on the priority setting; might just use that when we’re up against a deadline.

What scared us was seeing an estimate of 22 hours initially. It was still looking like 14 hours after working for 8, then quickly revised the estimate down to 11 hours. I guess the moral of the story here is don’t trust the estimate until the project is 30% rendered.

The rendered format is the same as the source format, but the 2nd video track is rotated and zoomed a touch. From what I’ve read here, those are culprits taking the time. I’ve done similar projects without the rotate and zoom and the render is usually less than 2.5X the running time, so the 11 hours for a 1 hour product was unsettling.

Would a high-power graphics card speed up the rotate/zoom? Our graphics card doesn’t have the horsepower to help.

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions

[Stephen Mann]

[Curt Charles] “It crashes enough without interruption. “

Could it be because it’s also your bill-paying PC, e-mail PC, still editing PC, etc.? I can count the number of Vegas crashes on my dedicated editing PC on one hand – since Version 3.

[Curt Charles] “I guess the moral of the story here is don’t trust the estimate until the project is 30% rendered.”

It’s impossible to estimate time to compress without actually compressing the media. The time to compress a group of frames depends mostly on how much changed from frame to frame. Time to render is a simple formula because every frame takes the same amount of time to render. But you aren’t rendering, you are encoding. (One of my nits with Sony is that they incorrectly confuse encoding and rendering).

[Curt Charles] “Would a high-power graphics card speed up the rotate/zoom?”

Probably not. At least not enough to make a significant difference. Raw processing power is what you need. Followed by as much RAM as your motherboard will support.

Turning off your Virus protection may speed up the “Render As” time. Turning off indexing on your editing HDD would help some. I haven’t experimented with this yet, but using an SSD for your temp files (you set the location of temp files in the config menu) may help. You can try setting the temp directory that Vegas uses to a hard disk you aren’t using for editing. Use the task manager to kill any background processes that you don’t need could help.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dieter Moreno]

Did you render uncompressed 1920×1080 progressive?

When I have rendered in uncompressed 1920×1080 progressive,it took up 55 Gb for a 4 minute long video after taking 3 hours.

I doubt that a 55 Gb 4 minute long video is your objective.

If it took 11 hours to render,assuming you have the same system specs as me (yours are better than mine) I’m guessing that your video is about 12 minutes long and outputed about a 165 Gb file.

[Curt Charles]

Shot in HDV (1440x1080i, compressed. Sony Z1 and A1 cameras which record to tape) and rendered to the same. The project is about 1 hour long and I don’t know its disk footprint.

We started a render and after about 20 hours stopped it; something was clearly amiss. We rebooted the computer and set Vegas’ priority to “High”. 10 and 1/2 hours later the render was done without a hitch.

We shot the next concert last night, this time with 3 cameras and 2 audio sources (plus 2 more for sync). We were very careful about ensuring the cameras were level; fixing a rotate problem in Vegas is possible, but will you ever pay for it!

Curt Charles
Lilywood Productions