Frame blending resulting in a darkened image

[Tero Ahlfors]

Try turning your Mercury Playback setting to software in Project settings.

[Xavier Bonet]

Hi, Tero Ahlfors, thanks for your reply.

[Tero Ahlfors] “Try turning your Mercury Playback setting to software in Project settings.”

Well, this seems to have solved the problem of my clips darkening. But won’t that dramatically slow down my final rendering?

Cheers!

[Xavier Bonet]

Mmmm… as I feared: to render a 4 second clip is taking me about 8 minutes… 🙁

[Jeff Pulera]

What other effects might you be applying? Seems unreasonable that a new machine would take that kind of render time just for speed change and frame blending. Can we see a screen shot of your export settings please?

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Duke Sweden]

I have no problem rendering sped up footage using frame blending on my crappy little consumer PC. You shouldn’t have to resort to turning off hardware rendering. Not questioning Tero, just saying maybe something else is wrong.

I just made this video. As you can see there’s a LOT of sped up video in it. I didn’t use frame blending on this version but I just re-encoded it a few minutes ago to test it with frame blending and there’s no difference at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEOXwQPY47A

[Xavier Bonet]

Hi, Jeff Pulera, thanks for your reply.

[Jeff Pulera] “What other effects might you be applying?”

No other effects. Just sped up the clip to about 1000%. Exact same settings as I used on yesterday’s clips and those of the day before on Premiere Pro CC on my PC.

[Jeff Pulera] “Seems unreasonable that a new machine would take that kind of render time…”

It really does. Which is why I’m going to contact Apple to see what may be going on. But that VERY slow render time was after I changed the Mercury Playback Engine to software, as recommended by a previous answer.

[Jeff Pulera] “Can we see a screen shot of your export settings please?”

I’m actually having this issue also while previewing. I just need to select frame blend and the image goes dark. I haven’t even exported the video yet. But, when I do, I’ll be doing it using H.264 with the preset YouTube HD 1080p setting.

[Xavier Bonet]

Hi, Duke Sweden,

[Duke Sweden] “You shouldn’t have to resort to turning off hardware rendering”

I agree 100%. Resorting back to software defeats the purpose of buying such an expensive computer!

[Duke Sweden] “no problem rendering sped up footage using frame blending on my crappy little consumer PC”

Up to yesterday, on my “crappy little consumer PC”, I’ve never had issues with this… I’ve had issues with most everything else! But never this. So I’m stumped. I’m doing nothing differently, except that now I’m using a MacBook Pro…

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Xavier Bonet] “I’m actually having this issue also while previewing.”

What are your preview format settings?

[Duke Sweden]

Believe me, I feel your pain. There’s a thread here somewhere, over 100 comments long, dealing with my frustration in buying a workstation, in my case an HP z800. I tried 2 times and both boxes, which at the very least should have blown my consumer PC out of the water, were worse than Windows 95 boxes of 20 years ago. I’ve given up since I’ve seen countless posts right in this forum where pros (which most of these guys are) with $5,000 setups have complained about freezing timelines and long renders. I figure what hope do I have in trying to stay under $800 bucks! The only thing left to do is scour the dumpsters outside of ILM 😉

[Jeff Pulera]

I also just tried 1000% speed with Frame Blending, literally took just a few seconds to export YouTube 1080p and looks fine, done on Core i5 office machine.

Do you have any other media to test this on? Maybe it is something to do with the video source – what are the specs of the problem clip – where does it come from?

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers