Magic Bullet Looks render times
 

Hi all,

I've been making wedding videos for a while now, shooting with a Sony Z5E and Sony FX1 in HDV and editing natively. I was running Premiere Pro CS5 on an Intel Q6600 (Core 2 Quad O/C @ 3.0GHz) with 4 Gb RAM. I bought and installed Magic Bullet Looks 1.4 and I must say I am really impressed with the results. However, the render times are fairly awful.

Due to the horrific render times, I went out and bought an nVidia GTX470 with 1.5Gb of onboard RAM and a week later, Adobe released a patch to Premiere Pro that enabled this card for CUDA acceleration. I then did some more rendering and didn't notice a performance increase with MBL.

Finally, I upgraded my Q6600 system to a Core i7 950 (running at 3.0GHz) with 12 Gb RAM. My system is much better now and Premiere Pro CS5 runs real snappy. However, MBL still doesn't render particularly quickly. I have noticed that it only seems to use one CPU core (of the eight seen in Task Manager) and I can only therefore conclude that MBL doesn't take advantage of multiple cores or CUDA acceleration.

My questions are:

1. Does MBL take advantage of CUDA and multiple CPU cores?
2. If it doesn't, is it likely to in the future and if so, when?
3. What other ways might I speed up the rendering process?

Obviously, I don't want to throw any more hardware at the problem even though I am fantastically impressed with the results and ease of use of MBL. Putting the odd MBL effect onto a 1.5 hour timeline is practical. Putting MBL on every shot would put me out of business because I can't afford to not do any edit work for 200 hours while Premiere Pro CS5 sits there rendering.

Does anyone have any information on this? Thanks in advance. :-)


Regards,

Andrew.
Carillon Video - Professional Videographer for wedding videos & more

I am interested in this problem 'cos I am in the same shoe.

Hi Andrew.

I'm not flaming your thread but it does appear (having seen some of your - good - work) you really do rely on MBL far too much.

I have MBL running with CS4 for the odd shot or two (i7 920 12Gb RAM), but while evaluating the plug-in found render times quite good even when I filled up 30 minutes or so of AVCHD footage. I shoot Z5 and NX5. Having found my CS4 purs along quite nicely, I think upgrading to CS5 for me brings to mind: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

But I guess it really does depend on what and how many effects are packed into your timeline.

Often bottlenecks are created in below-par disk management and disk arrangements, perhaps turning your attention to that might give you another avenue for investigation.

In addition, CS5 is a 64-bit application - is MBL 1.4 the upgraded 64-bits version? Red Giant is offering free upgrades if you purchased MBL on or after April 2010 - AS SOON AS THEY ARE AVAILABLE.

:)

MBL 1.4 is the latest version, and it is compatable with 64 bit OS and apps (CS5).
It has been released and is currently available.

No, MBLooks doesn't use the Mercury Engine. In the future, who knows - but I wouldn't hold your breath. If you find the rendering times too long, don't render. I sometimes keep the effects deactivated until just before I export.

Hi Claire,

Not sure what you mean.... you have seen some of my - good - work? Meaning the MBL stuff isn't my good work or it's all good but I use MBL too much? :-) I often wonder if I overdo it on the MBL but once you put it on one shot, all the other pale by comparison.

A 30 minute sequence with standard HDV from my Z5E would take all night to render if I put MBL on every shot. I don't know how you're getting 'good' render times. I already have a 500 Gb apps / OS drive and a 1 Tb RAID array made up of two 500 Gb drives for video.


Regards,

Andrew.
Professional Wedding Videographer and Wedding Video Production Services in Bolton, Manchester and all over the UK