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Optimizing my machine for rendering speed
I have a two part question on optimizing my machine. Suggestions are appreciated!
My workstation is a quad-core i7 at 2.93 GHz with 12 MB ram. I have a WD Velociraptor 300 MB as the system drive and a Hitachi 1TB as the data drive (Also files are backed up on a server with 6 TB RAID array, but I don’t work from there). Most of my Premiere work is putting together animations that have been created in 3ds max. I render the animations from 3ds max as a series of PNG frames and then composite the different layers of the movie in Premiere and add titles, labels, and transistions and so forth. I generally am not adding a lot of effects in Premiere (or AE), but some projects have a lot of layers with alpha transparency (15 to 20, which seems like a lot to me anyway!). Some of these projects take a while to render. I just did one that was 3000 frames and took 20 minutes to render.
1: Is there anything I can do with the system to improve render times? During the render, my CPU usage is only around 10-15 %. Is my HD setup the bottleneck? Are there any system settings I can change to make an improvement? Or am I expecting too much and this is actually pretty good performance?
2: What could I do in the future to improve the system? Should I look into adding a RAID 0 array of fast disks for Premiere to work from? Should I look into some add-on cards to speed up rendering?
Thanks for any help folks.
Brian -
3 Replies
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Is Premiere using all 4 cores? Are you rendering preview files or exporting?
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All 4 CPUs are being utilized, but total is less than 20%. Seems like it’s not using the CPU very well, but I didn’t know if something else is the bottleneck.
I was really talking about exporting files in my first post. I’m typically exporting uncompressed AVI files at 800×600. Rendering previews takes actually a longer time, which seems rather odd to me.
Brian
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800×600 uncompressed should create some humongous files. A bottle neck is possible. Do a test; create a SD project with pics or footage and render Mpeg2 DVD files. How does your CPU perform?
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