HDV to WMV-HD - Ridiculously long conversion times?

ten18 · Post by **ten18** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 5:18 pm

Is anyone else converting HDV footage to WMV-HD? I'd like to use WMV as a transition to Blu-Ray (or whichever HD DVD standard we end up with), since I have a new IO-Data file player.

Unfortunately, the file conversion seems to take forever. It took more than 15 minutes to convert a 1 minute clip. I tried it with a 60 minute video, and after 8 hours, it was at 25% completion.

I don't understand how it works, because it looks like it does the conversion twice. The first conversion (if that's what you call it) goes pretty fast, but then it starts over again at a much slower conversion rate.

Any ideas? Not a big deal, because I can just run my HDV projects back to tape, but it would be pretty cool to stream the WMV-HD format to my file player.

Keith
ten18

tyamada · Post by **tyamada** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 5:28 pm

I experienced the same thing trying to convert to HD WMV format. I never converted an entire file due to the fact it was taking too long. I just aborted the action and haven't tried it again.

Even converting MPEG2 HD files .ts format to .m2t format so I can spool it back to the camera takes awhile. 20 minutes of video takes about 1:20 to render.

I am going to need to upgrade my whole system to get the times down. The whole rendering process eats up all the processer bandwidth.

ten18 · Post by **ten18** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 5:34 pm

I don't know about this either. My rendering times in other formats are OK, but nothing to write home about. I have a dual-proc (3.06 GHz Xeons) system, with 2 gigs RAM and U320 SCSI hard drives. One would think that would be enough, but I'm pretty sure I'm having a problem with HDD throughput. I know when I edit in HDV, the drives are really grinding away (I'm not using proxy files). My drives score pretty low on HDTach, so I'm going to have to do some troubleshooting. I may try a SATA150 drive to see if that helps.

Keith

Terry Stetler · Post by **Terry Stetler** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 6:35 pm

Upgrading your CPU will be more useful than increasing drive speed as rendering is highly CPU dependent.

Dualies or dual core are better but a system with a PCIe X16 display will enhance HDV previews. Some newer cards are including HDV specific acceleration in their drivers.

Also remember that HDV files have about 4x the number of pixels as SD formats like DV, so transcoding will take about 4x longer on any given system and the more edits the longer it'll take.

As far as rendering to HD_WMV goes; AFAIK that encode is handled by the Windows Media Encoder HD_WMV engine just like any other plugin encoder.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 6:50 pm

This probably will not make any difference but you could give it a try
just to see.

View my earlier post (regarding a different rendering speed issue) in the VS9 forum.
http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic. ... highlight=