rendering

[Renton Maclachlan]

hmmmmmm...I have a fast computer...not the very tops but up there i7...Vegas 11 pro...

I have come tonight to render a 13 minute project to .avi. So far it has seized twice and it is rendering at about 1 frame per second...and says at the moment it is heading for a 4 hour 17 minute render time + 17 minutes it has done already. First time it got to frame 812 and seized. Second time to frame 1700 something. This time it is up to 1170 and still going...

Yeah it has chroma key stuff x4, and track motion, and compositing, but on the first section that had none of this, it wasn't going any faster.

Surely it should be doing better than this...

UPDATE:
Canned out at frame 1300 something...

[Leslie Wand]

what sort of avi?

does it crap out to, say, mp4?

if you open a new project and drop stuff into it will it render to your desired template?

[David Johns]

Originally Posted by Renton Maclachlan

I have a fast computer...Vegas 11 pro...

I have come tonight to render a 13 minute project to .avi. So far it has seized twice and it is rendering at about 1 frame per second

UPDATE:
Canned out at frame 1300 something...

VP11? Have you tried turning off the GPU acceleration in whatever render template you're using? That sorts all manner of crashes for me.

David

[Renton Maclachlan]

Next morning...

The render template is: Video for Windows (.avi) - PAL DV Widescreen

I'm having another go now with GPU acceleration off. (in Preferences)

Rendering is still just as slow and I have no hopes it will get right through...

Anyways...

UPDATE
Seized again...

[Kim Olsson]

Depends on what you are rendering exactly...

Shrek 3 took alot of rendering time... 20 million CPU render hours for the making of the film.
with more than 1,000 Linux desktops and more than 3,000 server CPUs

Toy story 3 movie, did take 7 hours to render only 1 frame/server.. 265 servers rendering 24/7 on 163 days before finishing..

But the strangest is that you are using 720x480 or 720x576 in resolution...

That wouldnt be so hard for your CPU...

You mention "chroma key stuff x4, and track motion, and compositing", well that IS very intensive work for the CPU... But hard to know exactly what you have in your project..

[Edward Troxel]

Try reducing the number of rendering threads in the preferences.

[Renton Maclachlan]

Just had another crash at frame 1770...

The chroma key stuff is footage from four cameras, with the keying done in three of them by Boris Red and the other one in Vegas Chroma keyer. The background in each case is made of four tracks of cloud effects and colour, with two of these tracks having compositing envelope from 100% to 0% over the thirteen minute length of the project. At any one point on the tracks with CK, there is only footage from one camera. I'm hardly at the level of Shrek!!!

Ed. My 'Preferences' are saying I have 16 rendering threads. What should I use?

And Dynamic ram at 350MB [max available 15257MB]

EDIT: in the past I've noticed [I think] that the speed of rendering along the timeline would be faster when there is less work being done at a particular point. At the start of this project I have about 6 seconds of text generated media and an audio track [which should go fast] but it goes just as slow as any of the CK stuff...

I've cut the rendering thread number back to 8... to see how it goes...speed is the same...

EDIT: Failed again at frame 1783...

EDIT: failed trying to render mpeg2...at frame 1683...

EDIT: failed again using mp4 internet 480p widescreen...got to something like frame 4500

EDIT: Failed again. Open file in v12 and tried rendering in it. Failed at frame 1783 again...

EDIT: failed again: V12 trying .wma at 512...got to frame 3700 something...

[Kim Olsson]

You could try lower the dynamic ram from your 350mb to 64mb. That helps alot of people when a render crash... You wouldnt hardly be able to build any dynamic ram preview with 64mb, but this would be a solution to your crashes..

I have 32gb of RAM and I though I could use at least 8gb of dynamic ram for the use of building a preciew when needed, but somehow Vegas is using all the time the amount of RAM you set and later it cant handle the load so Vegas crashes. When lower it Vegas get solid steady.

I never had to lower the rendering threads, but if you try, you have a i7 so vegas pro will use auto 8threads. So you want to try lower it to 2 or 4 or 1 for an example if you want to try it out for better stability...

This wont get Vegas to render faster, just better the stability. Hard to pinpoint your performance problem..
Maybe any corrupt files? Any bad plugins? Tried a fresh windows install?

[Leslie Wand]

agree with kim, but you could also try 0gb ram preview.

that's also quite a lot of heavy duty fx you have there. from my pov i would probably render out the ck backgound on its own, then use it as a single track....

[Seth Bloombaum]

Following up on what Leslie suggested, sometimes we've rendered all greenscreen foreground clips to uncompressed AVI with transparency. It's a horrible preview, raid-0 helps, takes lots of drive space, and that one step takes some significant time. But the final renders are bulletproof, and I'd suggest this as a fallback if all else fails.

This is a little different than what L. suggests, and, now that you've made the decisions on background plates his method is probably more straightforward. But it all depends on the project.

But, I'd certainly look at preview RAM, rendering threads, and GPU render settings first.

(If you're unfamiliar with it, uncompressed AVI with transparency is a 32-bit-per-pixel format where you have alpha channel built into the clip. Huge files. Balky playback, Great renders. Did I mention uncompressed?)

[Renton Maclachlan]

Thanks guys. I'll look at all those suggestions.

What I'm trying at the moment using a test file is to 'render to new track' the background, and once that is doen, also each of the CK tracks with their background...and any overlay that needs to go on them. The rendering of the individual CK track I've done so far only took about 6 minutes. I then have to cut the 'new track's up of course and use only the bits of themI want but if it works it is not too hard a job. Once I've got that CK out of the way, then I'll try an overall render and see what happens.

I'll let you know what happens...

[Renton Maclachlan]

Well...it seems I am getting snarled up on the GS stuff.

I've tried doing one track with Sony CK plus RED 'Select Corrected Colour' filter on it, along with its background rendered. So far I have got to 47 and about 56% finished before Vegas seized...had three seizures on these tracks...

I'm trying again with Dynamic Ram Preview set to 0MB and rendering threads set to 8...says it is going to take 1 hour 17 minutes...if it works...

Edit: Well it stopped at 56%...This time I'm going to halve the length of the render seeing I've been going over 50%...

EDIT: First 50% rendered. 2nd 50% failed after 26% of the render.

A question: I am rendering to .avi as above. When I first opened the 'Render to new track', to opened to some Sony format. What would be the preferable format to render to seeing I am going to have to render them all again into one file?

Also: I mentioned above that a GS render took about 6 minutes or so. What I over looked in that render was the RED 'Select Corrected Colour' filter was turned off. When turned on, the render time sky rocketed to over an hour.

[Renton Maclachlan]

Duh...I just thought of a way to to get around some of the difficulty.

Just 'Render to new track' the individual CK clips on a track, not the whole track!! Seeing some tracks only have about 15>20% clips on them, why render the other 80>85% which is blank? Absolutely slashes the render time down to minutes! And no render failures so far...

[Jim Schuchmann]

Renton,

Is Indexing turned on for the drive that your media is on?

RC on the drive, Properties, Indexing at bottom of page.

If so try turning it off including all folders and files and try a long render.

[Renton Maclachlan]

Originally Posted by Jim Schuchmann

Renton,

Is Indexing turned on for the drive that your media is on?

RC on the drive, Properties, Indexing at bottom of page.

If so try turning it off including all folders and files and try a long render.

hmmm...that's a good thought...I'll look it...although rendering only the events at this stage is clearly the way to go...don't know why I didn't think of it before. Sometimes solutions come to me slowly, but afterwards are so obvious...:-)