How to do rendering faster?

brianosmi · Post by **brianosmi** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:16 pm

If you really want to speed up rendering time considerably, the best way to do that is to capture your video in the format that you will need for the finished product.

While software can do this, you have to have a mega-PC to accomplish it without dropping any frames.

So, the next best option (and maybe the best option if rendering time is an issue for you) is to use a hardware solution to capture the video in the format desired. A good, cheap solution for this is something like Dazzle from Pinnacle. There are many others, but this one just comes to mind. The beautiful thing about it is that it captures your video and writes it to your hard drive in the format that you need it, so that very little rendering will be necessary to finish the production. All you need is a USB port on your PC (or laptop).

I let VS9 do the rendering for me, and it usually takes me about 2 hours to render and burn to DVD when my project is finished, but I don't mind letting it sit and work. I walk away and spend time doing other things when this is going on.

Just my 2 cents...

Brian Allen

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 12:15 am

Doug,

Just a small question regarding making a Hard Drive Image which I am sure a lot of readers would like to know.

How big is the Hard Drive Image and where do you keep it?
Fortunately I have 3 Hard Drive carriers installed (The 4th slot is my DVD Writer) though I have a fourth drive - an external USB.

In my case I have a draw full of spare Hard Drives which I can quickly slide in and so a couple have a complete copy of my Operating System, so I can be up and running in the time it takes to re-boot.

I also make a fresh Bootable XP Disk every so often slipstreamed with the latest service packs and security updates which again saves a lot of time should I decide to wipe a drive clean and start again.

brianosmi
I agree about your comments regarding a hardware MPEG encoder.
I have a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 with a built in Hardware encoder.
Upon checking Task Manager before and after starting a recording the PF usage remains the same and only a slight increase in the processer usage. I selected the pre-defined settings "DVD Standard play 720x576
Bit rate variable 6400, peak 8000." and don't have any problems.

I am also able browse the internet whilst recording - doing it now in fact.

Doug2006 · Post by **Doug2006** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 1:48 am

sjj1805
As for the size of the hard drive image and where do I keep it. If I remember when I first install the operating system I could get it ( the Image) on one 700 meg disk. But add any software and then you would be at 2 cdr's and of course the more bloat you get in programs then I have been up to 4 cdr's. The bootit program will allow you to burn this straight to disk or disks or put the image on a harddrive. If you put it on a harddrive you have the option of breaking it up to make it so you can burn it later. I have just gotten a DVD burner so now I am planning on burning image right to dvd. This eliminates multiple disk's unless you have a lot of stuff. But I use the program to partition all my disks so I can just have a partition to store images too if I want to. When you consider the price of the disks (DVD's) it is not bad to have your operating system frozen in time and knowing it can be restored in about 15 minutes. Also I don't store anything on my c drive it is just the operating system and programs. So my back up only reflects that system and programs. My next drive is the d drive which is still on the same physical hard drive as c but is a separate partition. Doug

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 2:02 am

Hi Henrik,

I've done quite a lot of tests on my own system, which has a P4 2.8c.

Rendering an AVI file to MPEG2 (single pass) occurs at just under 1.5 x real time.

I've found it to be virtually independent of installed RAM, but with a slight benefit from faster RAM. It's also more or less independent of hard drive performance, showing only a very slight improvement with faster drives. It's better to write to another physical hard drive, but in your case you only have one.

I would estimate that your system should render an AVI to MPEG2 at just under 1.3 x real time.

You might consider overclocking (your nice video card suggests that you might be a gamer!) since rendering performance scales more or less directly with CPU speed for a given system. If you have a non-overclocking o.e.m motherboard, you might still be able to overclock with a sofware program such as CpuCool, downloadable as trialware, and expect to get maybe a 20% benefit. If your P4 is an "e" model, however, it'll already be running a bit on the warm side at stock speed.

I fully agree with using a hardware profile to limit the windows services that are runnning. I normally use a "safe" profile which cuts out unwanted stuff, which has around 30 processes running. My "bare bones" profile enables me to reduce that to just 12 services, including VS and task manager.

You should certainly consider disabling the indexing service and system restore, both big resource hogs.

However, I must add that rendering speed is hugely dependent on the amount of filters effects and overlays you are applying. I've done test renders with a few filters and an overlay track that render at many times real time.

You can also render things overnight. I don't know if there are ways of automating this, but I read in a recent post of a developer pack for VS.

THoff · Post by **THoff** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 2:13 am

One way to automate rendering is to save the projects to disk, and then using Tools -> Batch Convert.

There, you can add both video files (AVI, MPEG etc.) as well as project files (VSP) to the list of files to convert. Specify the output format, and set the output options (bitrate, aspect ratio etc.), and let it work overnight.

caveman · Post by **caveman** » Tue Dec 27, 2005 5:05 pm

Firstly, I am still using video studio 7. What I do is to first look at the entire length of the video. Let's say it is one hour long. I use the extract video, and select retain selection. I set my first mark at the very begining of the video. I then enter 15 min and select this to retain. This gives me a video of only the first 15 mins to work on. It is much faster to devide your program into smaller files and then combine them when finished. After I have finished with my first 15 min section I repeat the process again with the orginal file but start at 15 min and finish at 30 min. I then work on that 15 min part. Continue this way until you have finished your project. I usually name each segment like this -- part 01, part 02 etc. It is much faster making all your edits, cuts, and music and overlays in smaller videos. Remember your orginal video is not effected when you devide it into smaller parts. Example. After you have finished with part 01, just start over and import to the time line the orginal file. It is still the same file and not missing the first part. Then mark the begining like 15 min and the next at 30 min. When you have finished part 01 then create a finished /save mpg file such as part 01 finished.

Get out of video studio. Restart program, drag the finished part 01, 02, 03 etc into the time line. Now render all parts together. Because each part is complete it renders quite fast. When I am working with a 720 x 480 video I select quality at 100 %, VBR 8000, and change to LPCM for the music. This seems to prevent the audio from becoming out of syn. What I do is not set in concrete but works good for me. Especialy if you do the high quality render each time you make a change which I don't. When I first start working on say each 15 min part I do a high qualiy render and the go back to the faster render. After I have made some changes I do a high quality render again and then back to faster. I switch back and forth as I think is neccessary. Hope this may help.

caveman

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 7:21 am

Here is a screenshot of my Windows Task Manager with my
"Video Editing" profile

Here is a comprehensive guide to the various Windows Services
http://www.theeldergeek.com/services_guide.htm

I created a new "User Account" for video editing, then I moved everything from my startup folder to the Registry at
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]

Moved everything from
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]

To

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]

So that these items would run when I am logged on as a normal user but do not run when logged on as a video editor

rguthrie · Post by **rguthrie** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 11:01 am

sjj1805 (Steve, right?),

I'd be interested in seeing a screenshot of the Task Manager during "normal" profile as well. I'm interested in your physical memory usage differences as well.

Thanks,
Ron G.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sun Jan 08, 2006 8:36 pm

Ron
Screenshots as requested. I rebooted the computer then once the machine had settled down I took these snapshots.

Regards
Steve J

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 4:27 pm

Hi Steve,

glad to see you've got down to the magic 10 plus Task Manager and your Hardware Monitor! You don't half have a load of (shall I say) stuff running by default!

What are you using for your screen captures? That could save me a bunch of time in some of my posts!

rguthrie · Post by **rguthrie** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 6:46 pm

Steve,

Thanks for posting so myself and other can see visibly, what a difference this makes.

Available:

Before - 707808
After - 822412

System Cache:

Before - 352992
After - 298268

Pretty impressive.

Thanks again,
Ron G.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 7:14 pm

2dogs
I just press the print screen key then open up a graphic program like
MSPaint, photoshop, photoimpact etc and then paste.

Thanks for your list, wouldn't have got down that far without it.

Regards
Steve J

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 3:32 am

I have just compared my Normal Profile and my Video Editing Profile with a Video File 6min 57.28 seconds
After rendering with the video profile I renamed the file to ensure that it did not smart render.
The video has no editing whatsoever, no cuts, no transitions no added sound etc.

Video Editor Profile
Time to render 11 Min 45 Seconds.

Normal Profile
Time to render 12 Min 13 Seconds.

I would expect to see a wider gap when I perform the same task on the video when I have edited it with various cuts, transitions and moving paths etc.

Steve J

2Dogs · Post by **2Dogs** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 2:00 am

sjj1805 wrote:I just press the print screen key then open up a graphic program like MSPaint, photoshop, photoimpact etc and then paste.

When I try that, it doesn't work for me! I think I may have to re-enable the "clipbook" service in at least one of my hardware profiles! It has some dependent services too. Sometimes you end up throwing the baby out with the bath water!

Thanks for your list, wouldn't have got down that far without it

No problem! I got down to it by shutting processes down in task manager. I knew I'd closed one that I shouldn't have when I got the message "Windows needs to shut down...sic" and it gave me about a minute to get things in order and prepare for the shutdown! You can be quite adventurous when you know you have planty of backup images. I'm forever poking around in the registry chopping out stuff I don't like the look of - like most references to MSN and Real Player for starters, closely followed by symantec!

Re your results - seems about right to me. You won't see any huge improvements unless you really had way too many processes in your normal profile, but it's just squeezing the last bit of performance from the system. You might see a similar small improvement from the use of low latency RAM with good timings, but the amount of RAM is irrelevent unless you are Smart Rendering.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:38 pm

For the information of anyone who wants to go along the extra profile path
or just simply wants to speed up their computer, here are another couple of useful links to assist you in your fine tuning of the Windows Operating system.

http://www.answersthatwork.com/
http://www.what-process.com/index.aspx

Could be worth placing in your "favourites" for future reference.