What am I doing wrong????

[Jerry Porter]

I have an i7 920 with 12 gigs of ram, a PNY 3800 card, G-raid 4 tera-byte drive, and CS4. It's taking me 45 minutes to render 2 min of video. I KNOW THIS CAN'T BE RIGHT!! what am i missing???? I know that you can't make a living at this rate and I know I have to be missing something simple. I have the latest drivers and chip-set, I have flashed the bios, and re-formatted the hard drive etc.. It is as slow as my 2.6 dual core laptop for now and I know that is not how it should be.

[Adam Gold]

That does sound slow. What video format? HDV? AVCHD? XDCAM?

This should probably be in the PC Editing forum.

[Perrone Ford]

Oh, it very well MIGHT be right. Depends on what you are rendering.

So let's start with the basics.

1. What camera did you shoot with?
2. How many tracks are on the timeline
3. What effects have you applied?
4. What format are you rendering to (.mov/.mp4/.avi and what codec)


With those basic questions answered, we can give you some real answers. And to give you some idea, I was rending single clips on Friday night with three layers of graphics applied and Magic Bullet Looks. I was getting 30 minute renders for 20 seconds of video. And my machine probably as fast as yours. There's a reason they render Hollywood movies on render farms of 20-50 machines and it takes days...

[Jerry Porter]

Hey P,
I have about 4 lines on the time line (simple stuff... titles etc..), nothing really intense, it was shot with a 7D and converted via Cineform to intermediate. I am exporting to .wmv. I cant imagine a more simple edit/export.

[Perrone Ford]

If you are going from Cineform to .wmv and the frame-rates and project settings match, then there is definitely something going on. That should move right along. I get anywhere between real-time performance and 2:1 on those renders. And that's WITHOUT going to Cineform first.

[Jerry Porter]

They match to the point of going from 29.9 1080 to 29.9 to 720 X 480 for the web. I'm really at my wits end here. This should not take this long.... If anyone knows of a good computer tech in the Raleigh, NC area I'm willing to pay good money (as it's costing me in time) to have this fixed!!!!!

[Tripp Woelfel]

The down resing to 720 will cost some, but without color correction or anything else fancy, I smell a fish somewhere.

[Jerry Porter]

Me too.... I cant get it to go FAST... It works, but at a snails pace. I'm off the Helping Hands to try and pay someone to fix this for me...

[Bill Busby]

Is this box connected to the net? I've always preached to always keep an edit rig isolated from the outside world for a number of reasons (PC or Mac). The first thing I would look for in a case like this would be something like malware running in the background eating up tons of cpu cycles. Good luck

[Dave Stern]

Jerry this might sound like dumb advice and/or it may be too late, but you've got to use trial and error to narrow down the problem.
- Does the same thing happen when you render your cineform project to quicktime?
- Do you still have the raw source video before conversion to cineform - can you open that and render it to WMV without your edits & fx?
- Is your source and destination file on the same drive / can you put those on two separate drives? Etc.
- Do you have a version of your project without FX, without deinterlace, etc. and can you render that from cineform to wmv?
- Do you have movie maker on your PC that shipped with it - can you use that to render your cineform to WMV and does it have the same performance (for example).

No question something is not right, so it will take a little experimenting to figure it out but I know it can be figured out by eliminating variables to track down what is causing it.

Good luck!!! you can do it!!