Rendering Option

TheDavidFactor · Post by **TheDavidFactor** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 7:51 pm

I'm multi-track editing mixing AVIs and stills from the AVIs with a voice over audio track.

After I get over about a minute in to the project real-time rendering starts to become dog slow, especially when moving backwards in the timeline. It works fine on a single clip going forward, but pauses at every clip endpoint (and there are a lot) I've been looking for a realtime hardware render solution, but I can't find anything that says it works with MSP8.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Mon Jun 12, 2006 11:31 pm

It shouldn't be a problem on your system. Where do your temp files reside? On the system disc or on the SATA? How much free space on the system disk?

I suspect your system is running out of temp file space and the drive may be too fragmented also. There are a few post on this board, concerned with tweaking your system for video work. Did you have a look at these and done some of the tweaking?

As for your other question, sorry, can't help you there.

Devil · Post by **Devil** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 6:16 am

Real time rendering depends on what you are doing. If you have many effects, then, yes, they will slow things down. My system will render at RT or a little bit slower for most things, but, on occasion, it will take ~16x RT, where I have complex composites. Sure-fire RT under all conditions is a myth with PCs and simple software rendering, IMHO

GeorgeW · Post by **GeorgeW** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 12:59 pm

What type of *.avi's are your source videos, and what are the properties you are rendering to (i.e. *.avi, *.mpg, resolution, frame rate, etc...).

If your stills are very high resolution, you could get better performance using lower-resolution stills (try it to see what resolution works best for maintaining final quality)

Take advantage of Smart Render (if possible) -- that will save you unnecessary rendering time...

Regards,
George

TheDavidFactor · Post by **TheDavidFactor** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 3:56 pm

Thanks for all the replies. I'm still using the trial version of MSP8 so I can’t install SP1. I don't know if this might affect any of my questions or not.

I’ve done searches on every term I can think of and haven’t found the posts about tweaking system performance.

My effects are very limited but I've got an enormous number of cuts and stills. My sources are AVI and WAV; single tracks of each. Each project will have a single AVI and WAV but may have as many as forty stills. I'm syncing the video screen captures to the voiceover audio. To do the syncing I'll stretch or compress the video and/or cut it and insert a still taken from that frame. All stills are jpegs created by msp8, so they are at the video resolution. I'm using the NTSC DVD template for the project and for the final render.

I may have a thirty second clip of video that has 10 cuts, 5 stills and stretched video. The problem comes from trying to scroll back and forth over this section. I’ve used Process Explorer while I’m editing to monitor system utilization and at every cut the processor will peg and there will be a lot of disk activity (all of which is the Video Editor reading) before continuing. The whole AVI is only 450 MB and would easily fit in to memory. I’ve got 2 GB of memory, is there any way to get MSP8 to use all the memory available and cache all the video in to memory?

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 5:27 pm

If your AVI is only 450MB, then it probably isn't DV, and most likely uses a codec such as DivX that utilizes interframe compression, where the current frame depends on the previous keyframe and all the partial frames up to the current frame.

Video like that is poorly suited for realtime editing, especially when moving backwards in the timeline as you stated in the second paragraph of your original post.

TheDavidFactor · Post by **TheDavidFactor** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 6:18 pm

Ok, I'm showing my lack of knowledge here:

I thought DV stood for Digital Video and just meant any computer video format. I was using the default windows compression (MS-CRAM, I believe) for the AVI files. I'm in the process of converting them now. I'm using Virtual Dub for my pre-process batch work.

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 7:16 pm

DV takes ~13GB/hour, so 450MB would be about two minutes if it is a straight transfer from a MiniDV camcorder. If you take the DV data stream and transcode it to another format, you'll lose quality in the process.

The generally accepted workflow is to edit in the original format if the source is DV, or use a lossless codec like Huffyuv if you have an analog source. You transcode to your output format (generally MPEG2 for DVD, or WMV/MOV for the web) as the final step.

MS-CRAM is an old Microsoft video codec from the days of Windows 95. If quality is important to you, stay away from it.

TheDavidFactor · Post by **TheDavidFactor** » Tue Jun 13, 2006 8:05 pm

This isn't coming from another device, these AVIs are directly recorded screen captures. I had used Virtual Dub to resize them but had tried to keep everything else the same. I went back to Virtual Dub and used it to uncompress the AVIs and that made all the difference. THANKS!!!!