Love Vegas Hate Render time

[Mike Kujbida]

Alex, you're going to hate me but I just tried this with a short HDV clip (downloaded from the net).
I repeated it until the timeline was 4 min. long and rendered it out with your settings.
It took 30 min. and was 243 MB. in size.
BTW, I'm one of those lucky folks with a new quad core :-)

[Alex Thames]

Weird! Something must be wrong with my settings, because my file was getting to be around 1gb. What went wrong? I think 200mb or so sounds much more reasonable for 4 minutes of HDV footage. Btw, I'm not sure if this affected anything, but I had cuts (edits) on average maybe every 2-3 seconds, and around 10 audio tracks, though many were very simple ones (just one sound effect).

What exact settings did you use to render?

[Mike Kujbida]

I just used the default WMV settings:

8 Mbps HD 1080-30p Video

Audio: 192 Kbps, 48,000 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo, WMA9.
Video: 29.97 fps, 1440x1080, PAR=1.3333, WMV V9 CBR Compression, Smoothness 90.

[Danny Fye]

Originally Posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle

Having a dual/dual core for example, really speeds things up. Having a SATA RAID really speeds things up.

How does having a SATA RAID help speed things up if one has only one RAID setup.

For instance, if I use two drives as a raid 0 drive and all other drives are of the normal types wouldn't rendering from the raid drive to the normal types be slowed down because the normal drives aren't as fast?

Would I get the benefits of the raid drive if I render a file from and to the same raid drive say from one folder to another?

Sorry about so many questions but I am not real sure about all this because I haven't setup raid before.

I just built a new system that has an E6420 Conroe at 2.13 ghz with 4 meg shared L2 cache and it is a whole lot faster than what I had which has a Pentium 4 HT at 2.8 ghz.

What took an hour and 43 minutes to render now takes 37 minutes. Still, I can see how my not so fast hard drives can be limiting how fast the renders are.

To sum it all up, what I would like to know is how I should set-up the raid 0 that will work best for Vegas. Does it take two raid 0 drives to really make a difference?

I have a new Western digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM and plan on getting a second one for the raid 0. Because I have a very limited budget especially since I built a new system I don't want to invest in another drive if it won't really help me.

Thanks in Advance,
Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs

[Jeff Harper]

I run seven hard drives on my editing station, two are configured in a Raid 0 setup...I do not see any speed differences in rendering times when rendering to a faster or slower hard drives. The processor is where the bottlenecks seem to be, not the hard drives.

I have tried so many different ways of rendering, and nothing seems to speed anything up but a faster processor. That is my experience.

[Laurence Kingston]

Just a little reminder that if any of your tracks are set to 3d alpha, render times are just horrendous. Sometimes a person will have a track set up in 3d alpha for a tiny bit of overlay rendering then leave it on. If you do this you get just unbelievably bad render times. Maybe it isn't this, but I'd check just to make sure.

[Danny Fye]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

I run seven hard drives on my editing station, two are configured in a Raid 0 setup...I do not see any speed differences in rendering times when rendering to a faster or slower hard drives. The processor is where the bottlenecks seem to be, not the hard drives.

I have tried so many different ways of rendering, and nothing seems to speed anything up but a faster processor. That is my experience.

Then why would DSE say that a RAID does help a lot?

My new system with the E6420 does speed things up considerably. My past experince is that dual channel ram helps a lot as well.

With my old system it looks like the hard drives were waiting on the processor. With the new system it looks like the processor is waiting on the hard drive.

So a bottleneck is a bottleneck whatever the cause.

Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Look to the controller (wow, that sounds like a line from the Matrix or something). :-)

A clean throughput to a SATA RAID makes a huge difference when dealing with both uncompressed and compressed files. But... it might be sharing resources when it comes to discussing the controller.
Kinda like USB. Works great on some systems, poorly on others, simply because of CPU resource allocation. Your controller might not be alone.

[Jeff Harper]

I am a poor judge, because my mobo has two separate integrated SATA raid controllers, and each of my two main hard drive arrays run independently (one OS and one work drive -both RAID 0). So truth be told I do not have any slow drives other than the externals which are for storage only.

I have rendered to the slow external drives on a few rare occasions, and I just didn't see any difference. I would still never run less than 10k drives to run my OS and work drives just on general principals.

You could invest in a 75 or 150GB 10K Raptor for very little and I would suspect you wouldn't really need the RAID configruation. When you get the money, buy a second Raptor then do raid. If your SATA controller is not integrated into your mother board, however, I am not sure I would spend my money on an add-on controller.

1st step have the correct MOBO with built in RAID (if you don't already have it) then buy your hard drives. If your doing video, it should just be without saying that you should have the fastest you can afford.

[Danny Fye]

Thanks much for the info and all.

I just spent the last several hours trying to see if I can create a raid-0 with the drives I have. They are not identical drives but I should be able to create a raid-0 with them.

I am using a cheap AsRock motherboard and the instructions on creating a raid leaves one begging to know what to do. Part one of the manual is easy but part two starts giving instructions on a software that works under windows xp that doesn't seem to exist. The manual doesn't tell me where the heck to get it. Not even on the CD that came with it nor on the manufacturers web page. Oh well...

Since this motherboard is a temporary and not permanent solution then I won't go any farther and/or waste anymore time with it.

Later on, probably this fall I will get a real motherboard with built in hard ware raid and dump the current crap that I am now using.

Still a whole lot better than what I had though. Afterall, going from an hour and 43 minutes to 37 minutes in render time is better than nothing I guess.

This AsRock only cost me $60.00 so that is not too bad for a temp motherboard and still be able to use my other junk from the other system.

No doubt that a faster system is better. For people like me on a limited budget and in this case limited patience it takes a while to build up to what one wants. And by that time it is obsolete and I end up starting all over again. LOL!!!

Thanks again,
Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs

[Jeff Harper]

I understand about budget! Good luck!

[Seth Bloombaum]

Danny, as I understand it, you're on the right track.

Hardware SATA RAID 0 MOBO support means that Windows and processor cycles are not used, the processor and OS see the RAID as a single drive.

What your MOBO manufacturer may be referring to is the software RAID controller built into XP, which can be accessed via Control Panel | Computer Management | Disk Managemet. Search the related help file for "Create a Striped Volume".

An XP managed RAID 0 uses many more system resources than a hardware controller does... which can impact render time negatively. So would a RAID managed by any add-in software.

However, though the main topic of this thread is render time, which will be reduced with faster drive throughput (eg. RAID 0), the main benefit I see from using RAID is better preview performance of more simultaneous streams while editing.

[Danny Fye]

Originally Posted by Seth Bloombaum

Danny, as I understand it, you're on the right track.

Hardware SATA RAID 0 MOBO support means that Windows and processor cycles are not used, the processor and OS see the RAID as a single drive.

What your MOBO manufacturer may be referring to is the software RAID controller built into XP, which can be accessed via Control Panel | Computer Management | Disk Managemet. Search the related help file for "Create a Striped Volume".

An XP managed RAID 0 uses many more system resources than a hardware controller does... which can impact render time negatively. So would a RAID managed by any add-in softward.

However, though the main topic of this thread is render time, which will be reduced with faster drive throughput (eg. RAID 0), the main benefit I see from using RAID is better preview performance of more simultaneous streams while editing.

The information I have found says that one can only create a raid 0 from Windows XP if they have Windows XP Professional. It will not work with Windows XP Home.

So unless there is a utility that will do the job, I am stuck. :(

If a software raid eats up resources for rendering it might not be worth the effort anyway?

If nothing else, this has been a learning experience for me.

Thanks,
Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs

[Ron Evans]

There is thread in the HDV section on Raid where I posted this:-
The CPU does the rendering using RAM. It reads it from the source disc, renders in RAM( and swap disc if there isn't enough RAM) and then writes to the disc specified for the rendered output. Hence for the lowest disc load one should have seperate discs for each source file, rendered file and swap file. If one only has one disc for OS ( including the OS swap file), source video files and the rendered file then the data is being writen back and forth to the same disc many times..... not good for efficiency or performance!!!!!! Having seperate discs for OS, temp files/rendered files and source files, limits the tasks on any hard drive to one video stream at a time. This is a trivial task for most modern hard drives. Hard drives are cheap. My set up uses OS drive, Temp drive( which also has the backup image for the boot/OS drive) and 3 video drives.
Most new drive can achieve over 50MBS but DV only needs about 3MBS. More than 10 times the needs of DV. Read performance is a combination of seek times and drive throughput. The seek times have not improved much but throughput has so limiting seek operation is very important to performance. Files need to be contiguous( all together not spread out over the drive) do this by having a defraged drive when capturing. Capturing to a drive with lots of files on it that hasn't been defraged will lead to the video file being spread all over the drive reaquiring the read to come from many places. . You can see that it is possible to have a RAID 0 be slower than two seperate drives reading two tracks that have contiguous files as the files on the RAID are interleaved between the two drives and if this requires many more seek operations it will be slower, especially if the read operation is for very short times(ie seek time could be longer than read time likely if this RAID has all video files and also the temp files on it). IF this RAID is a software RAID it will also rob CPU cycles too!!!! In a PC with OS drive, temp drive and storage drives the drive most likely to get fragmented is the temp file drive or the drive with the OS swap file on it. This is the drive that needs to be defraged( and the greatest need for RAID or Raptor 10K speed which improves seek time over slower drives) most as it will be the one that has small files writen to it many times and will be the bottleneck due to seek times. IF you want to spend money find the drive with the fastest seek times for this drive and keep it defraged.
Using uncompressed files is of course different but the issues of seek times and throughput remain and but will now be even more critical.
Needless to say I edit DV and some HDV and do not have any RAID on my system.

Ron Evans

[Paul Cascio]

Great thread. Thanks everybody!

Question 1: If you can have one Raid 0 setup, which function do you assign it to for best rendering Vegas? Where do you find these settings?

Question 2: Am I correct that MPEG rendering for making DVDs does not benefit from a distributed render farm?