Playback during rendering, general playback performance

mreinsmith · Post by **mreinsmith** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:05 am

This question is two-fold

1 ¡V Is there a way to turn off playback during rendering? I am guessing that doing this will speed up the rendering process. I looked in the preferences/setting and I am not seeing it (I could easily be missing it)

2 ¡V I¡¦ve noticed that many times during playback the video skips and the audio and video seem to be out of sync. I¡¦m running Windows Vista, 2GB memory, 1.8 Intel Dual Core , Radeon X600 256M. I¡¦ve had the ¡§unnecessary¡¨ services stripped to nothing since 5 minutes after I got the computer.

I primarily use VS to convert videos for YouTube from .m2ts (AVCHD) to WMI and then upload to YouTube.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

M

Post by **Ron P.** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:01 pm

Question#1:

There is no way to turn off the preview.

Question#2:

Is your setting in Preferences for Playback Method set to Instant Playback or High Quality? With Instant Playback VS must throw all your editing, everything together "on-the-fly". This is very demanding and consequently will be choppy. Previewing your work in VS is just that, a preview of how your project will be, an idea, not the finished pristine video.

You can change the Playback to High Quality, and VS will render a temp video file. This will be a much better look at your work. However considering the complexity, it will take a little time to render this temp file.

With the HQ playback you can use the "Preview Range", so that VS will only render that portion you wish to see at that time. To do this, Press the Project icon to the left, to make sure you're in Project mode and not clip mode. Then slide the "trim handles" inward to select the duration you want to preview. In Time-Line view you should see a red line running through this area. Go to Share>Project Playback, then select Preview Range.

mreinsmith · Post by **mreinsmith** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:05 pm

I'll give it a shot

Thanks Ron

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:35 pm

The playback during rendering is actually showing what parts are being rendered. If you are rendering an MPEG-2 file, and have SmartRendering turned on, only the parts being rendered will be shown.

I don't think the playback has anything to do with the speed of the rendering process.

mreinsmith · Post by **mreinsmith** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 3:14 pm

Nero has the ability to turn of the preview during rendering. When I used to use that turning off the preview increased the rendering time significantly. So there was really no need to investigate further.

So in the case of VS I used PsTools Process Explorer and the associated symbols for Vista, I've tested the threading and it's a little difficult to determine what threads are doing what.

However, it does appear obvious that the processor is being used to do more of that display than the video card is. I'm guessing that is because it¡¦s using the same memory space for the rendering as it is for the display (which makes sense). Whereas, if you were simply displaying it as a reference, you could use the as much of the video card memory as is available.

The trade off here is that VS is FAR more capable than Nero and I am totally willing to wait for the results, but I believe if you had the option to turn off the preview, it would save significant thread and processor consumption.

However, I have been wrong before

Black Lab · Post by **Black Lab** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 1:14 am

Do what I do. Start the render process, go grab a beer, and watch the game.

mreinsmith · Post by **mreinsmith** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 11:10 am

Good Plan! I am THERE!

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 1:54 pm

mreinsmith wrote:Nero has the ability to turn of the preview during rendering. When I used to use that turning off the preview increased the rendering time significantly. So there was really no need to investigate further.

Even at the highest quality settings, the VS preview is of fairly low quality.

Perhaps the Nerovision preview is high quality. You would expect that to have a higher overhead, and therefore to show significant render speed benefits when turned off.

Currently, VS11 does not make best use of dual core or multi-core cpu's. There is perhaps some "spare" processing capacity. It is believed that the upcoming VS12 will significantly improve dual and multi core usage.

mreinsmith wrote:The trade off here is that VS is FAR more capable than Nero and I am totally willing to wait for the results, but I believe if you had the option to turn off the preview, it would save significant thread and processor consumption.

I think you're probably right - and a lot of the time, given a choice, you would turn off preview whilst rendering. It's a bit like watching defrag progress on your hard drive!

Post by **Ron P.** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 1:57 pm

2Dogs wrote: I think you're probably right - and a lot of the time, given a choice, you would turn off preview whilst rendering. It's a bit like watching defrag progress on your hard drive!

It's not that fun anymore, don't get to see all those little blocks being moved around...

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 2:04 pm

You get something like it if you use Diskeeper instead of Windows' own defrag, and it's also many times quicker!

mreinsmith · Post by **mreinsmith** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 4:27 pm

I loved watching those little blocks, made me feel like it was really doing something.

but I'm glad they did away with it, i think i collectively lost about 10 years of my life watching it

Here's to VS 12!

M

CycleWriter · Post by **CycleWriter** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 4:39 pm

I'm confused. I never see any preview while my videos are rendering.

BTW, I started creating a DVD yesterday of a film I converted from VHS. It was 2hrs51min long and took all of 17hrs44min to create.

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 7:11 pm

The preview screen will remain blank when anything is being Smart Rendered - but your rendering time sounds excessive, unless you are making great use of video filters - maybe colour correction to the whole movie or something. Your X2 should be able to encode DV avi to mpeg-2 at about real time. Presumably your stuff from VHS is already mpeg-2, so you should be able to Smart Render that lickety-split!

Something's wrong....

CycleWriter · Post by **CycleWriter** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 8:09 pm

2Dogs wrote:The preview screen will remain blank when anything is being Smart Rendered - but your rendering time sounds excessive, unless you are making great use of video filters - maybe colour correction to the whole movie or something. Your X2 should be able to encode DV avi to mpeg-2 at about real time. Presumably your stuff from VHS is already mpeg-2, so you should be able to Smart Render that lickety-split!

Something's wrong....

As you surmised, anything coming in through the TV tuner card is captured in MPEG2, not AVI, so that part should have been easy. No special FX, but I did bump the gamma and saturation on the entire film, so that may have been what caused the long "converting video" step. I don't think VS and the term "lickety-split" are compatible.

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Fri Mar 21, 2008 8:53 pm

CycleWriter wrote:No special FX, but I did bump the gamma and saturation on the entire film, so that may have been what caused the long "converting video" step.

That'll definitely slows things down. Even Ken Berry's and Etech6355's quads would be brought to thier knees with enough filters....

You might check to see if you can change the settings on your capture card to alter the gamma and saturation without needing to do it in VS.

CycleWriter wrote:I don't think VS and the term "lickety-split" are compatible.

Thought you might like that! It can be fairly painless when you have Smart Render and everything else working for you, though. Maybe taking a big shot of tranquilisers or that stuff Rush Limbaugh used would make it seem quicker.