EXTREMELY Slow Rendering on VS11+

Chris Breet · Post by **Chris Breet** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 10:05 am

Hi Guys,

Bought and downloaded the new VS11+ last night as I had a small project to complete. The project is 16 minutes in lenght and consists of about 10 minutes of scrolling titles, a few pics and about 5 minutes of DV.

When it came time to render the project (to DV file), I was

to see how slow it renders (spesifically the titles). Project Preferences are set to AVI PAL.

My PC Details are:
MoBo: ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium
CPU: Intel Pentium-D 3.2 GHz
GPU: MSI nVidia NX7950GT
RAM: 4x1GB
HDD: 3x320 GB SATA-2, 2 x 400 GB IDE
OS: WinXP Pro

It has been chewing on this rendering for 5 hours now, it only completed about 50%!

VS10 never took this long, but in fairness, I have never rendered a project with so may titles - still, it is unacceptably slow.

A few observations: Prior to my installing SP1 on VS10, the CPU usage according to Windows Task Manager hovered around the 50% mark. Afterwards, it hovered at around 60% for the first 1 or 2% of rendering, then shot up into the 90's (where it remained for the rest of the render). Now, with VS11+, I'm back in the 50% bracket!

Also, the HDD is not working very hard. The light flashes very intermittantly.

Around the 50% rendering mark, I checked out the size of the .TMP file for this render. It was approaching 20GB! Considdering the project is only 16 minutes long, is this not WAY too big?

What/Where am I screwing up?

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Typically, on a PC such as mine, what are the expected times to render say an hours worth of DV down to 4:3 DVD (PAL)? (I know this is a difficult question, but just a ballpark answer please!).

Thanks & Regards
CB

Post by **Ken Berry** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 10:20 am

I have difficulty understanding why your VS11 should be taking so long... even with a lot of titles. That is no big deal, to my mind.

As for comparative performance figures in your final question, look at my system specs on my System button below. You will see that I have a decent set-up, but a slightly slower CPU, a somewhat less active graphics card (though with lots of RAM of its own) and half the system RAM. For one hour of DV being rendered to DVD compliant mpeg-2, it would take around 1 hour 10 minutes, and if there were lots of transitions, titles etc, perhaps as much as 1 hour 30 minutes. But certainly no more than that.

That is why I think there is clearly something wrong with that amount of time rendering your project in DV format.

Chris Breet · Post by **Chris Breet** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 10:49 am

Hi Ken,

Thanks for the feedback. Jip, your performance time is about what I found with VS10.

Where do you think I should start looking to find a cure?

The ONLY thing I can think of, is that (come to think of it), my VS11 did "hang" during the editting of the project and I just killed the process and reloaded. It worked fine, so I did not re-boot. Maybe I should have rebooted? I'll definately reboot after it is complete and re-render to see if it helped any - will report back.

stelch · Post by **stelch** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 11:28 am

Chris you must always reboot before you start rendering. It is a rule for me as I also had problems like yours before.

Stelios

Chris Breet · Post by **Chris Breet** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 1:10 pm

Hi,

I have rebooted since my previous post and re-rendered, but progress was equally slow. Cancelled the re-render and it's busy rendering to MPEG-2 DVD now (also slow).

The final file size of the PAL AVI file mentioned in my first post, was 33 GB! How can this be? Uncompressed DV should run about 4.2 GB / 19 minutes or there about - how can 18 minutes of DV rendered now occupy 33 GB???

Post by **Ken Berry** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 1:35 pm

Just to correct a misapprehension, DV is in fact a compressed version of 'uncompressed' or true AVI (though the algorithms it uses mean that it is largely lossless). The latter runs to about 65GB per hour, whereas, as you know, DV/AVI runs to about 13 GB per hour. So it sounds to me that somehow or other, you have managed to select uncompressed AVI, though the file sounds rather too large even for that!!!

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 2:20 pm

Could be another DirectX issue.
It's worth a try, I would goto the MS website, download & install the latest DirectX even if you feel your system has the latest DirectX drivers.
This will eliminate Directx as being a problem.

This has solved many issues with VS11+, I guess they distribute the latest version & patches on the retail CD of VS11+ which in the download version isn't practical to do.

Chris Breet · Post by **Chris Breet** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 7:15 pm

Hi,

Downloaded the latest DirextX and installed, but still, rendering speed has not improved at all!

Chris Breet · Post by **Chris Breet** » Wed Jun 13, 2007 8:20 pm

Can anybody that has VS11+ render this file to a 4:3 PAL DV (.avi) file as a "speed benchmark test" for me and report back?

Intro Title.VSP

It is a 12 second piece consisting only of titles. This little thing takes 1 minute and 45 seconds to render on my machine - which is CRAZY!!

As you can see from my "System Details", the PC is not a bad spec - it should cruise through this task!

Thanks for the help guys!

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:19 pm

I have VS11+ running on a machine which has a Core 2 Duo 2 GHZ CPU, 1 GB RAM and an NVidia Go 7600 graphics card.

I rendered your opening title 3 times. In the first, I selected 'Same as Project Settings'. It took 1 minute 25 seconds to produce what was an uncompressed .avi of the title, with a size of 366 MB.

I then rendered it as a DV/AVI, and it took 1 minute 5 seconds for a 44 MB file.

And finally, I rendered it as high quality DVD (8000 kbps), and it took 1 minute 7 seconds.

I was not particularly surprised by this since, as you say, this is a set of titles, some of it animated. In other words, it is not video to begin with. But in each case, VS is having to convert it into video, and the differing times taken with the different formats is reflective of both the complexity of that task with the algorithms used by the different codecs, and to an extent, the size of the file being produced.

If you want to see slow with regard to titles, use Cool 3D, which I do for wonderful titles. But my one major complaint, like that of most other users, are the incredible rendering times to convert the title to usable video. I normally too use 12 second opening titles, and Cool 3D will typically take 20 to 30 *minutes* to produce an uncompressed AVI!!!

Anyway, this still doesn't answer the question why your project is taking so long to render, which it simply should not do, especially if SmartRender is enabled (meaning that the DV segments should not be re-rendered...)

Incidentally, regarding your title, quality-wise, the (to me) noticeably best of the three was the DV render, where the small letters along the bottom in the final segment were consistently clean and crisp -- though I suspect that the slight fuzziness in them noticeable in the other two formats might disappear in the final DVD.

FRance · Post by **FRance** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 3:54 am

How about trying a clean re-installation? (there's no harm in trying =P)

http://www.explorecommerce.com/members/ ... 31&ID=9882

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 4:17 am

stelch wrote:Chris you must always reboot before you start rendering. It is a rule for me as I also had problems like yours before.

Stelios

Erm.... never heard that one before and unless you have set up a special Video Editing Profile
it shouldn't be necessary. What you should do though is close all other unnecessary running programs, no good trying to play space invaders or mess about with a spreadsheet or word processor whilst your video is being rendered.

FRance wrote:How about trying a clean re-installation? (there's no harm in trying =P)

http://www.explorecommerce.com/members/ ... 31&ID=9882

I would try and find other causes first.

Your system specifications are suitable and so we need to examine what might be causing this problem. Top of the list would be that you are using incorrect settings or codecs.
Double check your project settings and make sure you haven't accidentaly chosen uncompressed avi, changed the format from NTSC (29.97 fps) to PAL (25 pfs) or vice versa. Make sure you haven't selected the wrong field order and so are converting a lower field first to upper field first or vice versa. Check those screen sizes PAL 720 x 576, NTSC 720 x 480.
check you are not changing 4.3 into 16.9 or vice versa. In other words double check ALL of the settings.

Are you sure your source video is DV and not Xvid DivX or some other "avi" format.
Where did it originate from and how did it get onto your hard drive.

Chris Breet · Post by **Chris Breet** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:18 pm

Thanks guys for the response Ken, France and SJJ1805.

Ken, I always knew that the Core 2 Duo is much faster than a Pentium D (MHz for MHz), but you are kicking my butt by about 50% and I've got 1.2 GHz on you!

I hope that somewhere I have a setting that is causing this problem.

France, I only installed the software (version 11) on Monday night, thus, the installation is fairly fresh (but, I'll keep it in mind when all else fails). (I have been using previous versions of VS as well)

SJJ1805, I'll attempt to answer you question as follows:

Although I don't have a special Video Editing Profile configured (I only today started reading your excellent tutorial on Workflow (from DV to DVD, where this topic is addressed), the PC was left to perform the rendering with no other applications running (except Task Manager).

For this project, the Captureing and Output file was on my "F:" drive, which is a 400 GB IDE drive. My C-Drive (the location of my OS, Program Files and the VS "Working Folder") is a 320 GB SATA-2.

Project Properties were as follows:
The Title File (that I offered as a download above for a test), was set as PAL (25fps), Microsoft AVI, 24 bits, 720 x 576, Lower FF, Uncompressed (this was as per the standard "AVI/MPEG" drop down selection box that you can select). In reading the Tutorial mentioned above earlier today, I realised that my workflow methods is not perhaps totally in line with the best practice advised on this site, but I'm learning and will correct this. This AVI setting should be changed from Uncompressed to DV-1.

The VSP file that contained the final work, the Project Properties were set as: MPEG, PAL 25 fps, 24 bits, 720 x 576, Lower FF (DVD-PAL), 4:3, 8000 kbps, LPCM Audio 48000 Hz, Stereo. I could have sworn that I set this to AVI as well, but guess not!

Normally, the video is capture from my Digital 8 Sony Camera via a Firewire link. The video that this particular piece contained (and I must again stress that the actual video segments were short and few and far between - the bulk of the content were animated VS titles) had 2 sources. One was from an Analogue source that was recorded (some time ago) on my Pioneer DVR-530H-s HDD DVD Recorder. For the purpose of including some of that footage into this project (and due to some time constraints), the footage was burned onto a DVD on the Pioneer, and then "converted" using Intervideo DVDCopy 5 to AVI (which I suspect is using a DivX codec as the clip has a fading DivX logo on the bottom right corner for the first few seconds of playback (hardly noticeble). The other source for the clips, were from a friend who recorded footage using his MiniDV camera. However, I am not sure how it was captured. The file format as it was presented to me (on a Data DVD), was (according to the properties of the clips when viewed from VS) "Microsoft AVI files - OpenDML", DV Type 2, 24 bits, 720 x 576, 4:3, Data Rate 3702.12 kbps with PCM 48kHz, 16 Bit Stereo sound.

Again, the speed of the actual video rendering, was not the main problem, it was the speed of the TITLE rendering. No 4:3 / 16:9 conversion setting problems were found (everything was 4:3)

Immediatly after posting this, I will change the Project Properties of the Title file (downloadable above) to see of the change to DV-1 (as opposed to pure uncompressed does anything). Also look at changing all the VSP files that make up the final piece, to have identical settings. (The recommended workflow to first render the completed file an then use this file in the authoring process, was new to me - but will be incorporated in future projects. I'll report back shortly!

Thanks Again Guys, appreciate the help!

Cheers
Chris

Chris Breet · Post by **Chris Breet** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:26 pm

Report Back #1:

Changing the Project Properties to DV-1 and rendering to PAL DV, made no change to the speed (still 1 minute 45 seconds). However, was this not to be expected? The titles are not "video clips" per se prior to rendering, thus the DV-1 setting has no reference. It should only be having an effect on video still going to be captured. Am I right? (which is btw, the title of a song by Erasure)

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:41 pm

I don't understand why you say the rendering of you title clip is so slow when, compared to the tests that Ken did, your time (1:45) is right in the ballpark with his (1:25). And why do you think your titles are what is causing the slow render?

To me, the problem probably has to do with the fact that you are using many sources of video, some analog, some digital, and some DivX

. DivX is a highly compressed format designed for viewing, not editing, and it cause problems for many (most) people.

I think at this point it would be most beneficial if you right click on a clip from each different source and post their properties here.