VideoStudio X7 rendering CPU Utilisation

[Engage_Brain]

Hi,
This is my first post, having just purchased VideoStudio Ultimate X7.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the program, being easy to use and intuitive (to me) - I'd class myself as just starting out in video, although I've used a number of the open source tools (handbrake, WINFF, ffmpeg).

My question relates to the rendering performance of the product.
All other operations are quite snappy. It's just that when rendering, it never uses 100% of the CPU(s). It doesn't matter what settings I use.
I've tried the performance optimisation settings in preferences. These *do* make a difference on my system. Rendering a on the "MPEG-4 AVC (720 x 480, 25p, 2.5Mbps)" moved from 9%-10% to around 35%.

I've also tried hyperthreading on/off - no impact. I've distributed input/output files across the two SSDs, so disk queueing is not an issue.

Why is it not running available cores up to around 100%?

My configuration is:
CPU i7-4930
RAM 24Gb
GPU Gigabyte R7 200
DISKS - OS Drive - SSD, SCRATCH/SWAP - SSD, Storage, 2Gb 7500RPM
OS Windows 8.1 64bit

Clearly, I don't have a hardware issue (I built the machine for photography editing).

Programs like handbrake on equivalent settings peg the machine to 100% A task that takes handbrake ~4 minutes, takes VideoStudio ~12 minutes.

I've searched the forums, but really found a discussion on rendering performance. Apologies if I missed something.

regards,
Hans

[richflorida]

Hi,
This is my first post, having just purchased VideoStudio Ultimate X7.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the program, being easy to use and intuitive (to me) - I'd class myself as just starting out in video, although I've used a number of the open source tools (handbrake, WINFF, ffmpeg).

My question relates to the rendering performance of the product.
All other operations are quite snappy. It's just that when rendering, it never uses 100% of the CPU(s). It doesn't matter what settings I use.
I've tried the performance optimisation settings in preferences. These *do* make a difference on my system. Rendering a on the "MPEG-4 AVC (720 x 480, 25p, 2.5Mbps)" moved from 9%-10% to around 35%.

I've also tried hyperthreading on/off - no impact. I've distributed input/output files across the two SSDs, so disk queueing is not an issue.

Why is it not running available cores up to around 100%?

My configuration is:
CPU i7-4930
RAM 24Gb
GPU Gigabyte R7 200
DISKS - OS Drive - SSD, SCRATCH/SWAP - SSD, Storage, 2Gb 7500RPM
OS Windows 8.1 64bit

Clearly, I don't have a hardware issue (I built the machine for photography editing).

Programs like handbrake on equivalent settings peg the machine to 100% A task that takes handbrake ~4 minutes, takes VideoStudio ~12 minutes.

I've searched the forums, but really found a discussion on rendering performance. Apologies if I missed something.

regards,
Hans

I know it is probably a silly question. Are you sure you are running the 64bit version of the program?

I am running and AMD A8 and rendering of anything more that 3 minutes long brings all of my cores up to 90-100%.

Rich

[wpaul98]

Hello,

I am experiencing similar symptoms regarding CPU utilization. However, the symptoms occurs depending on what FX filter I am using. BTW I am using VideoStudio X7 Ultimate (VSX7).
Currently I am working on a project that led me to use the NewBlue FX ColorFast filter.
Everything was great, except when it was time to render the video. It took about 1hr 56min to rendered a 3min 24sec video.
I search this forum for any solution and tried everything I found here, without success. I read some messages about NewBlue FX filters not being 64bit, however this is a filter that came bundle with VideoStudio X7 Ultimate. I understand that this doesn't mean that the filter had being optimized for 64bit, but only had being made compatible to run on 64bit version of VSX7. After reading all these messages, and some others related to video accelerator, etc, I decided to use other filters, that provided me similar output ColorFast was giving me. I found "Enhance Lighting", "Hue & Saturation" filters to provide me with a similar output (I still like ColorFast output better) and rendering was much faster. It complete rendering the same video (3min 24sec) in 3min 46sec.
I also test "DeNoise" and "Advanced DeNoise" and found out that these filters doesn't use all CPUs available, so rendering is not as fast when using these filters. (I use Window Task Manager/Resource Manager to confirm CPU usage)
So, like someone before me asked, are you using 64bit or 32bit version of VideoStudio X7. And, are you using any filters.

Sorry for the long post and hijacking your post. BTW, first time poster, long time reader.
- Wilfred

[qtrim]

wpaul98, did you ever find a solution. I too like the results of the Colorfast filter, but it's ludicrously slow. Would running X7 on a 32bit install of Win7 help?

[Davidk]

CPU utilisation, or more properly comparatively poor cpu utilisation - especially with modern cpu's that have multiple cores - seems to be a recurring performance theme for VS.

Multi-core CPU's did not become prominent in PC's until Windows Vista appeared - say, early 2008. In 2007, The original developer of VS (Ulead) was bought by Corel and subsequent (to 11, ie from X2 onwards) version updates have borne Corel's face.

Note that programming to use multiple cores is a skill, and requires specific tools. In this commentary, I discount the later versions of the OS, which will run a program in a separate core from the OS if there are 2 or more cores available. And home machines were not the only one's affected - I know of a case (mid-2000's, pretty much 10 years ago) when a large corporate went to some expense to update to large fast servers and was disgusted to find out (later, bills paid, when testing showed little performance improvement) that 3 out of 4 cores in the server were idle because the well known, brand email software in use did not not use them.

Some time (six months+?) ago I queried the moderators about the state of updates to the core VS code, reasoning that sufficient time had elapsed since the Ulead takeover and the appearance of multi-core cpu's for the programs in VS to have been overhauled by Corel to take account of/use that capability. But it turns out that at that time the overwhelming majority of programs that make up VS are still of Ulead origin. That is, they pre-dated multi-core cpu's and thus almost certainly don't don't use them. The results of that on diagnostic test would show one or more cores working and the others in an idle loop.

So, apart from techniques to reduce or eliminate internal delays (like, organise the program, OS and data each on physically separate drives <hard to do on a laptop> and install pots of RAM <really only feasible when running a 64bit machine>), there really isn't much a user can do to improve the cpu utilisation performance of VS. These are quite effective, but once only and at the margin. Living with it is really the only option until a multi-core version is available. And if it already is, then the efficiency of the programming is really an issue.

Pressure on Corel to articulate their multi-core programming strategy (moderators??) for those of us who have already invested dollars in the program often over many versions/years would not go astray and would certainly help the moderators answer these type of questions.

Davidk

[RobertOZ]

I would have to agree with davidk, Video Studio needs rebuilding from the ground up,(if Corel have the technical expertize to carry out such a task), most of the development engineers were Ulead employees who it would appear were not retained when Corel bought Ulead, so that could explain why there is a considerable amount of old Ulead code present in current versions of VS.
It has been well documented on this forum that the 64 bit version is not much of an improvement on the 32 bit version and compared to other NLEs on the market, is horrendously slow when rendering, this does appear to be more of a factor when fx filters are used, although some projects with New Blue filters applied, seem to render at a reasonable speed and others do not.
As a test I created a project in Adobe Premiere Elements 13 using the New Blue Colorfast filter, only a small 2 min. video, rendered to the same properties as the clip, render time 46 seconds. I then created exactly the same project in VSX7 64 bit, rendered the same as first clip, after 12 mins and only 7% complete I cancelled the render process, but as I have previously said not all fx filters render this slow. Rendering with Adobe does use all 8 cores and averages 80-90% CPU usage, whilst VS only uses all 8 cores in short bursts only with an average of 4 cores utilized and CPU usage in the 30-40% range, Adobe also uses much more RAM than VS when rendering.
But even with all its faults VS is still my preferred video editor, it's so easy to use.

Robert

[bobp]

I've only used VSx7 for a few months. But every time I check CPU usage, all for cores run at about 85% for as long as I monitor it. I've done two major projects involving different video formats and still photos. Poor quality original video required cropping and sharpen filters on most clips, as well as a third filter on occasion. Videos with a length of an hour and 20 minutes rendered to mpg2 with mpg4 settings, with a couple of filters, take just under 10 hours. Fortunately the results have been worth it.