[Richard Mamary]

Russ,

Thanks for the confirmation.
I appreciate the swift reply.

Regards,
Richard

[Richard Mamary]

I should have also mentioned I am also running OSX 10.5.2, also fully updated.

[Richard Mamary]

Thanks Kevin,

buy an extra internal hard disk and install all the new software on that

I actually did clone my original Tiger Disk, which booted fine to start with, and then when I was installing it in an enclosure, the drives board fried.
I tried to find a replacement board for the drive online, but couldn’t find it.
I can’t spend $1,000 to try and resurrect it, through data recovery services, it’s not worth it, so that is done.
I’ll try the NY board, but I wanted you to know I was smart enough to initially do what you suggested. In fact I always do it.
Thanks for all your help.
Richard

[Richard Mamary]

Ok
I’m completely desperate again.
All the help all of you gave me was great, and I was able to shave down those render times.
For whatever damned reason, TimeMachine kicked in, in the middle of the night, and declared, (through a popup window), that the backup drive was too small.
Again, this happened while I dared go to sleep. (Something I’m not likely to chance doing again), and it caused AE to crash with nine minutes left on the second 5hr render.
After rebooting, running utilities, etc. I reopened AE, checked all the settings you all gave me, everything is the same,…
I started another two hour render, (with a single effect), that should have been five hours long max, and its back to telling me it will be 8hrs again.
I am ready to meet my maker at this point.
AE worked so much better on my G5 running Tiger with only 1.5GB memory and a 128mb Videocard.
Since I upgraded to Leopard, increasing my Ram to 5.5GB and adding a 256mb Videocard, I’ve had nothing but renders that are at best two times longer than they should be.

I can’t even revert back to Tiger because I only have my Tiger upgrade disk, and can’t locate the Panther installation disk that came with it.

Is anyone here in the NYC area? And, willing to make a house call? I will pay for someone to come out here. If I don’t get this job done for Christmas, I am going to lose not just an important client, but all the referrals he was giving me.

[Richard Mamary]

Thanks Darby!

[Richard Mamary]

My Friends,
Thank you for all of your help.
All your suggestions helped me to make test tweaks that set me up for the major render that I have running presently.
So far so good, the first hour indicates :30min in with 1:50 left, so that’s well under 2.5hrs per render, with one effect, for every hour of footage. That sure beats 8-9 hours for each!
We’ll see if it holds up. If so, I could have my 7.5 hrs by noon tomorrow… Tell me I’m not dreaming… We’ll see.
These newer number make more sense, and seem representative of that which I was getting running Tiger with 6.5 (Though not much better considering I upped my RAM and Videocard…
But at this traumatic point I would be happy to get m Tiger numbers again.)
I may have further questions when the results come in.
Thank you all.

[Richard Mamary]

Even if there is a decent jump in quality by using the animation codec, as it increases render time and file size so dramatically, I will not use it for this project.
As an aside, when I am working with animations I make from scratch with AE, the animation codec files, though large, render at a faster rate in those instances.

I am bit rocked that turning off the fields in “Interpret Footage,” cuts render time in half as well. As there is no scaling, blur etc., this is a great trick. The footage does look heavily interlaced.

When making my mpeg-2’s, (I use Compressor), do I need to undo this, and how?
Should I open the file beforehand with QT, and check deinterlace?
Will that make a difference?

[Richard Mamary]

I just tried a test render from the DV-NTSC -> Animation, and it indicated that it would be a ten hour render, instead of 4 hours for the NTSC->NTSC render.
As I have hours and hours of footage, I can’t afford that much time for the potential quality.

Thanks for your input Darby, I’m learning a lot. I just hope my old brain can hold on to it!

[Richard Mamary]

Thanks again, very much.

However, i might recommend rendering to lossless or an uncompressed format, not for speed, but for higher quality (your final render will need to get compressed to mpeg2 for dvd, so you’d be better off not compressing to dv then to mpeg-2).

Yes, I am going to mpeg-2, which unfortunately AE does not support. I was hoping it would be included in CS3.

I often use the animation codec, (though the file is huge), for quality purposes when rendering animations.

But, I have also always thought that if the source is already DV-NTSC, then for AE to render it such, it would not require further compression. Have I been wrong about this all along?

Would I maintain more quality by rendering the original compressed DV-NTSC source as Animation, before compressing to mpeg-2?

Should I be capturing this stuff, (mostly analog 8mm tapes), as uncompressed, or DVCPro to begin with? Would it make that much of a difference?

And yes, I will only use one filter from here on!

[Richard Mamary]

Kevin,

Thank you so much for your well though out response. I had to run out for a bit, then when I came back, run tests on your suggestions.

Yes, multiprocessing was enabled, and described “as being used” below on the prefs page. The memory setting was even at 120% and it still showed.

I already had openGL enabled for previews, but not for renders. When I enabled it for renders, it actually slowed things down about 10%, even when PhotoFilter is not being used.
Open GL seems to work fine for previews though.

When I checked Interpret Footage, in the file menu item, it did say lower field first, I changed it to none, this did seem to get me quite a bit of speed as well.

I will remember to set it back to lower field first, when I work with sources I’ll be scaling and rotating in sequences.

As far as codec, it is DV-NTSC source footage, and I am rendering it the same. This should make the render as fast as possible, right?

What is, “storage overflow,” in the render settings, and should that be checked or not?

Does “enable disk cache,” affect speed? What settings are best?

But for the biggest speed increase, I would be better suited to just use one type of correction, perhaps Levels only, if I want speed. The 16 hour render time for a 2 hour piece is cut down to a mere 4 hours, when I use only one filter, without separating fields. This may be as good as I can do.