Rendering Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 in Premiere Pro CS5
 

Hi all,

I was doing some rendering last night on my edit box and I noticed something that got me thinking maybe my system isn't configured correctly.

Basically, I had a 25 minute HDV 1080i timeline in Premiere Pro CS5. I dropped Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 on it and added a custom preset. I then accepted the look and hit enter to render the now red timeline. The render box appeared on screen and rapidly went up. It took maybe five seconds to do over 300 frames and then it dropped in speed to around 2 frames a second.

Is this normal? It seems to me that Premiere Pro is hitting a limit somewhere. It's like maybe loading the first batch of work into video memory and then it runs out of space and slows to a crawl. Could it be hard drive cache?

My system is:

Core i7 920 CPU
Asus P2B mainboard
12 Gb DDR3 RAM
nVidia GTX 470 graphics card
500 Gb SATA2 drive for OS and S/W
1 Tb (2 x 500 Gb SATA2) RAID Array for media

Anyone seen this before or have any ideas what may be causing it? Could it be normal operation for MBLs 2.0? I seem to remember it also did this with the older version of MBLs.

Does anyone have any benchmark times they can share so that I can work out whether my system is rendering optimally?

Thanks. :-)

Kind regards,

Andrew
Carillon Video - Professional Wedding Videographer & Wedding Video Production Services in Bolton, Manchester & all over the UK

Re: Rendering Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 in Premiere Pro CS5
 

MBL is not GPU supported so most of the work is done by the cpu.
Render time depends what effect there are also on the timeline appart from MBL.
And yes it can be slow.

Re: Rendering Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 in Premiere Pro CS5
 

Hi Ann,

Thanks for your reply. :-)

You are indeed correct that MBLs doesn't use the GPU for accelerating render times. However, I'm running MBLs 2.0 which should be faster. The Red Giant website says:

"We enhanced the CPU/GPU handling so it's easier to juggle and render large images. And the complicated Advanced I/O processing of Looks 1 has been replaced with a simpler Gamma processing that runs quickly and more efficiently. With Looks 2, you get more power and speed behind the scenes."

I realise this probably doesn't mean full GPU acceleration like the Mercury Playback Engine, but my question is more to do with render times for the first 300 frames compared to the rest of the frames in a sequence.

Also, like you pointed out, it does vary depending on which tools you add to the look, but without anything to compare my system to, I have no idea whether it's performing optimally. It takes me 13 hours to render a 1 hour timeline. Maybe it should take 6? Maybe I have a super powerful system and everyone else takes 26 hours to render the same timeline? It should be easy to benchmark very roughly. I'm not looking for accurate benchmarking. I'm just looking for a rough guide.

So, if you stick Magic Bullet Looks or Magic Bullet Looks 2.0 on a 1 hour timeline, roughly what would you expect the render time within Premiere Pro CS5 to be? 1 hour? 10 hours? 20 hours?


Kind regards,

Andrew
Carillon Video - Professional Wedding Videographer & Wedding Video Production Services in Bolton, Manchester & all over the UK