Speedy Renders? Magic Bullet/Celluloid Discussion

[Phil Hamilton]

I would like some comments on this thread regading realistic rendering times. I have a 3.0 GHZ P4 1G RAM DELL with an attached 160gb LaCie drive to store my videos.

I have a 45 minute AVI that I have appliced Celluloid 16mm Push Reelpack look to. I have also cropped the 4:3 video to look widescreen 16:9 (black bars at top and bottom).

The render is still rendering and looks to take 21 hours. I am rendering as a 2-pass DVD Archictect MPG BEST Quality video stream only. I know that if I remove Celluloid it will go much much faster.

Is this normal? What settings in RAM should I be using if any? Should I apply Celluloid first to an AVI render then re-render to MPG after that? Would that improve speed at all? Should I put source AVIs on the C: drive and render output to the external?

Thanks for all of your help and comments....

[Don Bloom]

The only thing I know is you typically don't need to render at BEST-GOOD is more than sufficent in 99% of cases. BEST will definately sllllllloooooooowwwwww your render down by a whole lot a' lot!
Don

[Bill Binder]

Only use "Best" if you have a lot of photos with/without pans/crops/zooms. If it's all video, use Good. Do a search in these forums for the explanation why, suffice it to say you are adding rendering time and pretty much getting nothing out of it. Also, be thankful you aren't using Magic Bullet, cause if you think your rending is slow now, you won't even believe what happens with MB. ;)

[Phil Hamilton]

Originally Posted by Bill Binder

Only use "Best" if you have a lot of photos with/without pans/crops/zooms. If it's all video, use Good. Do a search in these forums for the explanation why, suffice it to say you are adding rendering time and pretty much getting nothing out of it. Also, be thankful you aren't using Magic Bullet, cause if you think your rending is slow now, you won't even believe what happens with MB. ;)

I heard it was slower. This is regarding a movie my son made and is showiing to his Senior class Saturday night for a fund raiser. He and a friend directed and wrote and put in all the effects. Anyway, they first tried Magic Bullet but the calculation in the rendering was something like 60 hours!! So they went back to Celluloid. I had no idea that these filters would add so much on the rendering.

I would invite other comments about settings and workflow AVI to MPEG w/filters or AVI to AVI w/filters and then to MPEG w/o filters....??? Would there be a time saving at all??

[Bennis Hahn]

I have no scientific evidence to back this up but...

I always render to AVI w/ effects then to MPEG-2 w/o effects. I think it goes faster.

Also, if you just have 45 minutes of video going to, you don't need to do 2-pass encoding as it will all fit on a DVD with a CBR (even a high one; 7.5kbps-8kbps)

[Phil Hamilton]

Originally Posted by Bennis Hahn

I
Also, if you just have 45 minutes of video going to, you don't need to do 2-pass encoding as it will all fit on a DVD with a CBR (even a high one; 7.5kbps-8kbps)

Maybe I misunderstood then what 2-pass is. I thought it provided for better quality - not compression. Please confirm and thanks for the info - what a waste of time then for me.... phil

[Edward Troxel]

2-pass will help increase quality. However, in this case your program is so short that you will still get quality without needing 2-pass. He's saying that a high CBR rate will look just as good as using 2-pass VBR because of the short length of your program.

[Joshua Provost]

If your project is 60 minutes or less, there is very little (or no) advanatge to 2-pass. 2-pass VBR is intended to get the most of the bitstream at lower bitrates, so you can get more than 60 minutes on a disc, but retain the best quality.

[Phil Hamilton]

Originally Posted by Joshua Provost

If your project is 60 minutes or less, there is very little (or no) advanatge to 2-pass. 2-pass VBR is intended to get the most of the bitstream at lower bitrates, so you can get more than 60 minutes on a disc, but retain the best quality.

Thanks for the clarification. I ran some more tests. And need some addtional input.

I took out the 2-pass and cut the render in half per the above example. I left the Celluloid filter in which appears to be nothing more than applying color curves (pls someone confirm this) to the video. I found each of the reel packs as choices in the Color Curves filter. I created my OWN color curve look and the render took about the same time perhaps just a bit more but not a lot.

THEN - I decided to render to DVD Architecth NTSC 24p video stream. Without changing anything else - the render cut in half again!! 24p was faster than the standard DVD A NTSC 29.97i render. What is going on with this? I actually expected it to take longer. by the way the results looked pretty darn good except for some issue with the transitions due to the interlace timeline being converted to 24p as expected. Tks for your help.

[Joshua Provost]

Phil,

Yeh, what do those ReelPaks do? It seems just like some convenient presets to already existing controls.

If you output with 24p template, then it is a matter of Vegas doing the 60i to 24p conversion, instead of letting Celluloid do it. Vegas itself is faster. If the quality is acceptable to you, then go for it. Vegas does it a little different than other methods, you may get blended frames. Step throug the results frame by frame using each process and see what each is doing.

A lot of people seem to be using Vegas to do the deinterlacing with good results. For an NLE, Vegas does it quite well. It's light year better than what Premiere does. There are other ways as well, of course: DVFilm Maker, Magic Bullet, and some others.

Josh