Rendering in HD

[John Rofrano]

[Simon Lapointe] “My computer is a Dell i3.”

Well… there’s your problem right there. An i3 is really not adequate for HD work especially with multiple layers and FX. You need at least an i5 but an i7 is strongly recommended. If this is a laptop then that’s even worse. So yes, this is probably normal render time for only an i3.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Brett Cole]

My Canon 5d2 1080 projects render on best at a ratio of 10-30 minutes for every actual minute in the project. This is with pretty simple projects on an i7 3.4. So, layers, effects, and i3 could mean 2 hours for every minute, 35 minutes, 70 hours. I’ll let others add to this estimate

[Simon Lapointe]

Thank you for your fast response!

Yes, the laptop is heating too fast, and the CPU is not fast enough. So I’ve rendered my project in HD 720, 30ips: estimated time : 24 hours.

I will buy a new computer in september. I have a budget of 2000$. Do you know what are the best tower computer specs to do video and music for this price?

Thanks a lot…

Simon

[Stephen Mann]

That seems long, even for an underpowered PC. I have a quad-core processor, 2GHz, 8GB of RAM. Almost all of my work starts as HDV, mostly multicam, and ends up as Widescreen DVD-5. A 1:20:00 project takes about three-hours to encode to MPEG-2.

On the other hand, I had a set of five-minute videos that were heavily layered with SFX, and those took hours to render to AVI files.

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

[Dave Haynie]

This could be normal, but it depends a great deal on the specifics of the project.

If you have 1920×1080 video, you probably have AVC source files. How well does your PC play even a single AVC file? Now you have to decode, composite, apply effects, and render out… that’ll put a strain on any PC, but if you’re running a slower system, expect things to take longer.

The complexity of the effects is also a huge thing. Running a de-noiser (like Neat Video), for example, can take many, many times longer than either rendering anything else… I usually pre-render the video cleanup, if it’s needed.

I did a project a few years ago that took about five hours to render two minutes worth of video, and this on a Quad Core2 9550 processor (since upgraded to an AMD 1090T six core). Ok, sure, I had two main video layers and about 50 animation layers. but my point is basic: you pay for each thing you do in CPU time. If you do complex things, you’ll eventually want a faster PC.

The one thing to check: run the Task Manager, look at the Performance Monitor, and ensure that your CPU is running close to 100% when rendering. If it is, you’re going as fast as you can. If not, you have some other bottleneck… could be hard disc, for example — too much thrashing will slow down a system. Though that’s more likely on a faster machine.

-Dave

[Simon Lapointe]

Thanks for the tips :

My source files are MP4 and my processor is running at 100%. I think it’s all about the project itself : a 35 minutes cut-up film with 3 layers :

layer 1 : 1 sequence per 1 second with effects,
layer 2: 1 sequence per 13 seconds streched at 33% with effects
layer 3 : 1 long sequence streched at 2 % with effetcs

I use NewblueFX for the grain and luminosity and contrast…

It’s very experimental stuff!

[Jeff Schroeder]

The task manager tip might not be useful. It depends on how the mother board will throttle back the CPU when it starts to overheat. Placing the laptop near an air conditioning vent, with the bottom free from obstruction (propped up) and maybe add a fan blowing on it will help. Nobody designs laptops to crank out what is required by Vegas for a sustained length of time.

Jeff

http://www.narrowroadmedia.com

[Dave Haynie]

CPU throttling on laptops, or even desktops, under power management isn’t done for heat, except in the case of a poor design. Not that there aren’t bad thermal designs. But even at that, they’re dropping the CPU speed, so the device is still going to max out… just not as max as you’d like. And the CPU is still the bottleneck if it read 100%, still not the bottleneck if you’re not at 100% CPU.

Now sure, all modern CPUs have a power-down-to-protect option, simply because, without this, most desktop processors (at least) can thermally self-destruct in the event of a cooling system failure. You can run a more sophisticated CPU monitor to keep track of this behavior.

And certainly, for a laptop, you want to do rendering on AC power, with the power management turned off. That won’t prevent any self-preservation power down, but it will prevent power savings power down.

It’s different with an i7. While most CPUs are speced at their peak power, the i7 is speced at an average power rating. For example, the 1.6GHz i7 used in some laptops will clock up to 2.4GHz, more or less, as demanded. The actual speed depends on both cooling and the number of cores actually being taxed at the time.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

MP4 isn’t a video format, it’s a file wrapper (like .avi, .mov, .ts, etc)… but it’s usually an MPEG-4 Part 10 stream — aka AVC. That’s the most CPU intensive video we typically render, decode, or edit. See what kind of CPU power a single stream takes to decode on your machine… you might be surprised. And you might be more productive transcoding the MP4 to something else, before any editing. One option supported and rendered by Vegas is MXF/MPEG-2 format.

-Dave

[Simon Lapointe]

Thanks Dave,

I delieve it’s also affecting the capacity of the software when I use MPEG-4 to play the video wile doing the film editing?

So is it better to transfert the MPEG-4 in MPEG-2 before in Sony Vegas?
Or use a video converter like Superc or AVS (or a best one)…

The video quality is still the same?