Dear all, hope you can help.

I have a DV camcorder - new, not brilliant stuff, a modest canon mvx460. I
have quite a powerful pc with plenty of hard disk space.

My problem is that the length of time it takes to render a video. After I
copy my 60 minutes of home video onto the pc and edit this using say, Nero,
or Videoworks or the package that came with the camera, I find that once I
get this down to a 20 minute product it takes absolutely ages to complete.

I know that the rendering process is the longest part of video making. I was
dismayed to read in various websites and tutorials that people let this
happen overnight.

Is this something I need to learn to live with? The faff of trying to make a
decent little home video is such that I am tempted just to leave it,
transfer the lot to my hard disk DVD recorder and at least it will all be
done in 60 minutes and after I can just ff the rubbish bits.

What are your experiences and more importantly, what should my expectations
be? I have a 2.8Ghz pc with 1gb RAM and 250gb hard disk space.

Many thanks for any advice.
Jim

"Jim McLean" wrote in message
. ..
Dear all, hope you can help.

I have a DV camcorder - new, not brilliant stuff, a modest canon mvx460. I
have quite a powerful pc with plenty of hard disk space.

My problem is that the length of time it takes to render a video. After I
copy my 60 minutes of home video onto the pc and edit this using say,
Nero, or Videoworks or the package that came with the camera, I find that
once I get this down to a 20 minute product it takes absolutely ages to
complete.

Many thanks for any advice.
Jim

Not sure if this is any help, but upgrading from Ulead's VideoStudio 6SE
through 8 to 9 seems to have reduced the rendering time. (My PC now has a
spec similar to yours - previously it had half the RAM, and 1/3 the
clockrate. It was s l o w .)

--
M Stewart
Milton Keynes, UK




--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Wed, 06 Sep 2006 21:51:27 GMT, "Jim McLean"
wrote:

My problem is that the length of time it takes to render a video. After I
copy my 60 minutes of home video onto the pc and edit this using say, Nero,
or Videoworks or the package that came with the camera, I find that once I
get this down to a 20 minute product it takes absolutely ages to complete.

I know that the rendering process is the longest part of video making. I was
dismayed to read in various websites and tutorials that people let this
happen overnight.

The trick is to render in the same format as the input file. If every
frame has to be converted to a new resolution, colour depth,
frame-rate etc. it's going to take a long time. Choose an output
format that doesn't require this.

If you DO need to change format, what's wrong with leaving it
overnight anyway? Having edited you don't have to render Right Now.
Save the project and set it running at bedtime, if you want to use the
computer for something else in the meantime.

In message , Malcolm
Stewart writes
"Jim McLean" wrote in message
...
Dear all, hope you can help.

I have a DV camcorder - new, not brilliant stuff, a modest canon mvx460. I
have quite a powerful pc with plenty of hard disk space.

My problem is that the length of time it takes to render a video. After I
copy my 60 minutes of home video onto the pc and edit this using say,
Nero, or Videoworks or the package that came with the camera, I find that
once I get this down to a 20 minute product it takes absolutely ages to
complete.

Many thanks for any advice.
Jim

Not sure if this is any help, but upgrading from Ulead's VideoStudio 6SE
through 8 to 9 seems to have reduced the rendering time. (My PC now has a
spec similar to yours - previously it had half the RAM, and 1/3 the
clockrate. It was s l o w .)

Relatively recently I got myself a notebook with the same CPU
clock-speed as my desktop, but with a dual-core processor, 2G RAM, and a
video card with 512M memory. Rendering seems (so far) remarkably fast
compared with my desktop.

But then again, when I do rendering I usually either go down the pub or
(if the pub's shut) go to bed.

To Jim, I'd suggest that you don't stand watching the wall for the paint
to dry. I'm afraid it's something you have to adjust to.

--
Tony Morgan

I know that the rendering process is the longest part of video making. I was
dismayed to read in various websites and tutorials that people let this
happen overnight.

I remember years ago reading a computer magazine where the guy was
extolling the virtues of this $8000 computer he'd bought. He was raving
about how quick it was with photoshop and he said that he could apply
an effect and walk away and have a cup of coffee and in 15 minutes it
would done - just like that.

Now we complain if completely re-rendering 90,000 frames (1 hours
footage) is less than real time.

There are of course real time rendering hardware cards available from
companies like Matrox that complete the task in real time or better
than real time.

The next range of intel processors should bring this time down
considerably...

wrote in message
ups.com...

snip

The next range of intel processors should bring this time down
considerably...


Nah, we will be back to square one, what with people now wanting to
shoot HD...

In message . com,
writes
Snipped....

The next range of intel processors should bring this time down
considerably...

The current crop of dual-core processors seems to have noticeably
improved matters.
--
Tony Morgan

"Jim McLean" wrote in message
. ..

My problem is that the length of time it takes to render a video. After I
copy my 60 minutes of home video onto the pc and edit this using say,
Nero,
or Videoworks or the package that came with the camera, I find that once I
get this down to a 20 minute product it takes absolutely ages to complete.

How long is "absolutely ages"?

It depends very much on a lot of factors - CPU speed, memory and HDD space
are just three.

If you can, render the output file to a different hard drive. I'm not
talking different drive letter, I mean a physically different piece of
hardware (some PCs come with a single large hard drive configured as three
different drive letters, C, D, E - that's not what we want). Ideally, you
want the destination drive to be on a different IDE cable than the source
drive. I don't know enough about SATA to know if the same holds true for
that.

Make sure your drives are being accessed as quickly as possible - with IDE
drives you should be in UDMA5 mode.

Another big factor is the efficiency of the encoding software. I used to use
Sonic DVDit, which produced appalling quality renders and took ages to do
it. It's possible, though, that speed and quality were affected by the
issues I've mentioned above, because I didn't know about them back then.

I never use Nero, but I just tried dropping a 38 minute AVI onto its
"timeline" and rendering out. I'm using two-pass video encoding and AC3
output. It's showing a 79 minutes as its estimate to completion, so
extrapolating that to your situation (factoring CPU difference and assuming
the use of the same hard drive for input and output), I'd suggest 20 minutes
of footage should take 45 mins or so. That's rendering to a VIDEO_TS folder
on the hard drive for burning later. You should always do that so you don't
have to encode again if your blank turns out to be a dud.

On Thu, 07 Sep 2006 10:05:06 GMT, "G Hardy"
wrote:

If you can, render the output file to a different hard drive. I'm not
talking different drive letter, I mean a physically different piece of
hardware (some PCs come with a single large hard drive configured as three
different drive letters, C, D, E - that's not what we want). Ideally, you
want the destination drive to be on a different IDE cable than the source
drive. I don't know enough about SATA to know if the same holds true for
that.

Not sure I'd agree disk access speed is all that much of a factor.

In message , G Hardy
writes
"Jim McLean" wrote in message
...

My problem is that the length of time it takes to render a video. After I
copy my 60 minutes of home video onto the pc and edit this using say,
Nero,
or Videoworks or the package that came with the camera, I find that once I
get this down to a 20 minute product it takes absolutely ages to complete.

How long is "absolutely ages"?

Snipped some good stuff....

Other things that influence the time to render a

Number and type of transitions. In fact any FX will lengthen rendering
time.

Though it's been implied, the particular codec that's being used by your
video rendering software. Again, as briefly mentioned, the number of
passes - some codecs allow you to use one or two passes. Though it's a
generalisation, the more passes the better the end quality but the
slower to render.

Conversion from PAL to NTSC and vice versa slows things down.

Keeping your hard disk defragged helps to improve matters.

With some video editors the way that you do things can influence to time
taken to render. For instance Vegas gives you several rendering options;
the fastest with Vegas is where you separately render video and audio
and let DVD Architect put the two together while burning.

--
Tony Morgan