hdv (mt2) faster then avi in After Effects

[Kevin Camp]

my initial suspicion would be that it is a data bottleneck at the drive or drive bus… if you have a bottleneck at the drive bus, then smaller, compressed files may work better than larger uncompressed files despite the higher cpu overhead for decompression.

you said you have a 300gb raid0. what type of bus is the drive using (sata, sata2, firewire…)? and is it using the system bus (on the mother board) or through an expansion card? to work most efficiently, your raid0 should be on a separate bus (like sata2 pci/pci-e card).

also, do you have disk caching enabled in ae? if so, it needs to be on a drive that is on a separate bus from your media…. so if you have a sata2 pci card for your media, set the cache to the internal boot drive. if you don’t have a separate bus, then disable disk caching, it will lead to a data bottleneck and reduce performance.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Greg Burkat]

Thanks Kevin !

Yes it must be a bottleneck problem.

The Raid0 is controlled by motherboard, sata2

I unchecked the disc cache, restart and ran the same test – no differance at all when rendering, the speed result was the same.

So in case of software problems I reinstalled a fresh vista 64bit and the new drivers – the “problem” is still here when rendering.

So I think that maybe this is simply too much for my motherboard and it needs an external card to control the raid ?

all of my hard discs are (all 7200rpm speed):
serial ata1 disc for system
serial ata2 disc for system page file
raid 0 with 2 serial ata2 discs for the media files and projects

is this realy too much and i need a controler?
_______________________
my motherboard has:
storage:

intel ICH10R SOUTHBRIDGE:
-6 x SATA 3.0GB/S PORTS
-INTEL MATRIX STORAGE TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTS RAID 0,1,5,10

MARVEL 88SE6111 CONTROLLER:
-1 x ULTRA DMA 133/100/66 FOR UP TO 2 PATA DEVICES

SILICON IMAGE SIL5723 CONTROLLER (DRIVE EXPERT TECHNOLOGY):
-2 X SATA 3GB/S PORTS
-SUPPORTS EZ BACKUP AND SUPER SPEED FUNCTIONS

AND THE CHIPSET IS INTEL P45 / ICH10R with intel fast memory access technology
___________________________

I simply hope that the problem can be resolved by software way instead of buing a controller. Is there still a chance that something is not configuret correctly ?

cheers

[Greg Burkat]

Hey, new test after enableing “volume write-back cache” in software raid controller ( intel matrix storage console ) :
____________________________________
render time before / after this option turned on :

with mt2 files :
34 sec / 26 sec

with avi lagarith files :
37 sec / 32 sec

with avi uncompressed files :
39 sec / 48 sec
_____________________________________

the avi uncompressed file is the largest one so it’s normal to perform the slowest way if i have a bottleneck .. but when the others have speed up, this type of avi has even slow down more .. I’m confused 😛

[Adolfo Rozenfeld]

Without knowing exactly what you call uncompressed (“None”, “Yuv 4:2:2”?), I am not surprised about MPEG-2 being faster than a third party codec. MPEG-2 is among the file formats that are handled directly by MediaCore, Adobe’s high-performance format handling library. With some exceptions, lossless encoders (like Lagarith)are more optimized for file size shrinking than performance. In any case, there’s no contradiction – MPEG-2 encoding should still be slower than non-temporally compressed formats handled by MediaCore.

Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe

[Greg Burkat]

Hi !

I made the problem dissapear , now the avi (render using lagarith’s default values) is faster than mt2 files when editing.

The solution was strange … i replaced my windows vista with windows 7 and it works faster now. With everythin the same – like page file placement and system adjustments .. the only differance is the windows version.

So .. as you can see if you have asus p5q motherboard or similar ( and you don’t screew your system like i did with vista), You don’t have to buy a hardware raid controller for working with full hd avi’s – at least for low budget productions of course 🙂

and one last thing, windows 7 is free to use in it’s beta version – You can download it from the microsoft’s website, everything that was designed to work in vista – is working 100% fine in windows7, i thought that it’s to early to work in such a new system – but everything works, drivers and all the programs – and it’s all a little faster than vista.

hey