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Old October 19th, 2010, 03:26 AM   #1
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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
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Old October 20th, 2010, 08:16 AM   #2
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I am interested in this problem 'cos I am in the same shoe.
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Old October 21st, 2010, 10:32 AM   #3
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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.

:)
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Old October 21st, 2010, 06:31 PM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Claire Buckley View Post
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.
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Old October 22nd, 2010, 02:36 AM   #5
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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.
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Old December 1st, 2010, 11:15 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Claire Buckley View Post
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.

:)
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
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