About speed of render - or most oftenly - the lack thereof

[Lars Siden]

Hi,

First of all: Excuse me, I'm rusty, have'nt been here for 7-8 months, got stuck in stills ( got me a Canon 20D with some extra candy )

However, yesterday I sat down to produce a DVD. Captured using Scenalyzer 5(whatta great app), imported into Vegas using my special lzImport(special module that sorts all clips in order by timestamp and removes short clips), I decided that the material was more or less "okey" - Just wanted to "unsharp" the whole movie to remove the "softness". Started a render to mpeg2 with trackFx unsharp. Slightly less than 1 hour of material took like 8 hours to render. (on a P4 @ 3.2 with 3gb memory, XP SP2, vegas 6.0c ).

Did a quick calc: 720 x 576 x 84000(width, height, nr of frames) equals about 35 billions of pixels to process - that is quite many pixels :-) So I can understand that it took some time. My question is more like: Would the render speed go up dramtically if I had done more effects? Like some colorcorrection? My gut feeling is: no. It feels like just handling this amount of pixels will take loooong time - so I guess that the amount of real work is rather low. Does anybody know for sure? Are their any tables pointing out "slow" effects? and the effect of combining slow effects? and one step further, which effects will gain on using network rendering?

I know that a p4@3.2 isn't top-of-the-line anymore, but it is rather expensive to get something more powerful, like a EE series CPU or an Amd 64....

Best regards,

Lazze Z

Sweden

[Dan Crandall]

John Meyer did a rendering time comparison of Vegas effects.
I think you will find the link below of great interest to you:

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...ssageID=401776

As you already found out, the "Unsharp" fx is one of the slowest to render.

[Lars Siden]

Thank you! That list was great!

If there could be a list of networkrenderableeffects I'd be happy as a clown!

I'll try to find some time to make my own tests as well.

// Lazze

[Edward Troxel]

All effects can be network rendered. However, not all FORMATS can be network rendered. For example: NTSC DV AVI files can while NTSC MPEG2 files cannot.

Does anyone know the reason why certain file types cannot be network rendered ?

[Edward Troxel]

Because of the joining process at the end. Each node renders several small pieces and then these pieces are simply combined when all are done. This works well for DV-AVI. However, it does not work for MPEG2.

[Lars Siden]

I wonder:

Is the standalone MainConcept MPEG encoder faster than the vegas bundled one?

I have an old MC license hanging around, is it worth renewing it...?

Best regards,

Lars S

[Patrick Courtnage]

I was under the impression that mpeg2 could be networked rendered, under certain conditions. I think it mostly has to do with copyright law. As long as each computer has an installation of vegas with a different serial number compared to other computers, then network rendering works fine. I havn't tried this though so do not take my work on it. I think I read it in a vegas help file.

Originally Posted by Edward Troxel

Because of the joining process at the end. Each node renders several small pieces and then these pieces are simply combined when all are done. This works well for DV-AVI. However, it does not work for MPEG2.

Yeah i understand that much, but what i dont understand is why it wouldnt work for MPEG2 ? I would imagine joining the file at GOP intervals would be easy enough.. If MPEG must be written sequentially then the method would be to store the individual pieces of rendered data in a temp file and compile it all to MPEG when each part is done and returned to the host. I cannot understand how it could be a technical hurdle..

[Lars Siden]

Originally Posted by Randy Piper

Yeah i understand that much, but what i dont understand is why it wouldnt work for MPEG2 ? I would imagine joining the file at GOP intervals would be easy enough.. If MPEG must be written sequentially then the method would be to store the individual pieces of rendered data in a temp file and compile it all to MPEG when each part is done and returned to the host. I cannot understand how it could be a technical hurdle..

I totally agree that "sewing" together at GOP intervals should be doable. Maybe in a later release...

Now I'll swear in church: If only Premiere Pro had scripting, preferably .NET style

// Lazze

[Paul Kepen]

So you need more then 1 copy of Vegas for network rendering? I was going to try to use my laptop as a 2nd networked computer to speed things up, but NOt if I have to buy another copy of Vegas.

Also, just started experimenting. With SD DV edited in Vegas, according to the Architect 3 manual, they say it is best to encode to MPEG 2 in Vegas. Why is that better then using Architect to encode? What is the best way to encode widescreen DV? I've tried the Widescreen, and it seems to have a lot of mpeg artifacting in it, even after using a high VBR and 2 pass encoding. The quality is not as good as Premiere Elements - a $100 program with no 2nd pass. Also, the Vegas encoder seems to "bleed" red color borders badly vs unnoticeable with Premiere Elements. I tried to encode to 24p, it still bleed on the reds, but had very little artifacting. However, 24p seemed a little less sharp and had TERRIBLE motion blurring - making it unusabe in my opinion, unless you had little to no motion in your video.
Am I missing something? What is the best way to encode?

[Edward Troxel]

You can install your single copy of Vegas on up to 3 machines for network rendering purposes. You can also specify a network machine to do ALL the rendering into MPEG2 format so you could keep editing on your main machine while a network machine rendered the MPEG2 in the background.