Editing in X8 Painfully Slow - 6hrs to render 9min video

[herein2015]

Why is VideoStudio X8 so painfully slow? I'm very close to giving up on X8, if I could get a refund I would have already done so and moved on.

I have a Dual Xeon Hexacore system with 48GB of memory, dual NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 video cards, and an SSD system drive yet editing is almost impossible due to lag, freezing, and endlessly waiting for proxy files to be created. I have a clean install of Windows 10 Pro x64 and I am running Corel VideoStudio X8 build 18.5.0.25 64bit Ultimate. I have tried enabling and disabling Smart Proxy, enabling/disabling hardware decoder acceleration, different video card drivers; nothing fixes the problem.

I am on Day 2 now of trying to complete a project that consists of 1920x1080@30FPS media, some 4K media, a few audio tracks, and an embedded slideshow. The total video length is around 9min and I'm working on getting it down to 7min, but each render takes 6hrs, and after every render the clips are unwatchable until proxy files have been re-created for all of the clips. My output format is 1920x1080 MOV container with H.264 as the codec. All input media is MOV. I'm only using a single filter (ColorFast from TrueBlue) to do color grading. Turning on the color filter makes even the proxied video slow to a crawl so I have to disable the filter to edit the clip, then go back and enable the filter in all of the clips prior to the final render.

[Ken Berry]

I can only sympathize and agree that those are impossible rendering times, especially with your computer. I would have thought that making SmartProxy files totally unnecessary with it, but then again you said you get the long renders even without it. Others have found that some NewBlue filters unreasonably extend rendering times, but again you say removing Color Fast again makes no difference. (Incidentally, I am sure TrueBlue, who is a Moderator on our PaintShop Pro forum, would enjoy being confused with NewBlue!)

FWIW my own computers used for editing are an i7 and an i3 with far less resources than yours, yet I almost exclusively output to H.264 mp4/.m2ts 1920 x 10800at either 25 or 50 fps, yet have rendering times which are rarely much more than real time i.e. a 9 min project would normally take around 9 minutes to render. Any excess above this would be minutes not hours.

So that leaves to my mind only two other factors: your 4K videos and the .mov output. What format/properties does the 4K video have? If it is XAVC that could be the problem as X8.5 can only deal with XAVC-S.

As for the .mov output, why exactly have you chosen that? And do you have the latest version of Quicktime installed? Have you tried outputting to AVCHD .m2ts instead (without Color Fast)?

[asik1]

I thing NBColorFast was reported practically unusable on the forum.

[herein2015]

I thing NBColorFast was reported practically unusable on the forum.

I ended up ditching my video cards and going with a NVIDIA GTX 980ti. The difference is like night and day, no more proxy files all the way up to 4K. But I think you are right, NBColorFast even on my system makes the editing process almost impossible. With 1080P source media the preview window stutters if ColorFast is applied. I then did a render test with 1080P and timed the 5% mark. Without ColorFast it took 11s to render 5% of the project, with ColorFast it took over 60s to render the same 5%.

It looks like I am better off sticking to color grading my footage in Davinci Resolve then importing the clips into VideoStudio to put them together.