I've jsut bought myself a Dazzle Hybrid Analogue/Digital Decoder and it
comes with Pinnacle Studio 10 SmartStart. I've been experimenting with
recording a programme and then editing out the commercials.

But the time taken to render the finished project is very slow: a 45-minute
project has taken about 2 hours and it's still not quite finished. It's the
"Processing frame m of n" stage which is slow.

I captured as "DVD" format of MPG (*), as opposed to DVD Long Play, or as
any other file format, and I'm rendering at 100% quality, without any
compression to make it fit onto the DVD.

I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2 disk
(and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on the system
disk.

The PC is a Pentium 4 3 GHz with 512 MB RAM.


How long *should* rendering take, typically?



* Using the Pinnacle TV Centre Pro softwa it says that this is the best
format to use if you are later burning to DVD - presumably because it
requires least post-procesing during rendering.

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...
I've jsut bought myself a Dazzle Hybrid Analogue/Digital Decoder and it
comes with Pinnacle Studio 10 SmartStart. I've been experimenting with
recording a programme and then editing out the commercials.

But the time taken to render the finished project is very slow: a
45-minute project has taken about 2 hours and it's still not quite
finished. It's the "Processing frame m of n" stage which is slow.

I captured as "DVD" format of MPG (*), as opposed to DVD Long Play, or as
any other file format, and I'm rendering at 100% quality, without any
compression to make it fit onto the DVD.

I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2 disk
(and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on the
system disk.

The PC is a Pentium 4 3 GHz with 512 MB RAM.


How long *should* rendering take, typically?



* Using the Pinnacle TV Centre Pro softwa it says that this is the best
format to use if you are later burning to DVD - presumably because it
requires least post-procesing during rendering.

A suggestion - increase you physical RAM to 1 gig and set your virtual
memory to a minimum and maximum of 1.5gig
Should make quite a difference to rendering time. Also don't forget to
defrag your hard drive frequently.

"Stuart" wrote in message
...

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...
I've jsut bought myself a Dazzle Hybrid Analogue/Digital Decoder and it
comes with Pinnacle Studio 10 SmartStart. I've been experimenting with
recording a programme and then editing out the commercials.

But the time taken to render the finished project is very slow: a
45-minute project has taken about 2 hours and it's still not quite
finished. It's the "Processing frame m of n" stage which is slow.

I captured as "DVD" format of MPG (*), as opposed to DVD Long Play, or as
any other file format, and I'm rendering at 100% quality, without any
compression to make it fit onto the DVD.

I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2
disk (and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on
the system disk.

The PC is a Pentium 4 3 GHz with 512 MB RAM.


How long *should* rendering take, typically?



* Using the Pinnacle TV Centre Pro softwa it says that this is the
best format to use if you are later burning to DVD - presumably because
it requires least post-procesing during rendering.

A suggestion - increase you physical RAM to 1 gig and set your virtual
memory to a minimum and maximum of 1.5gig
Should make quite a difference to rendering time. Also don't forget to
defrag your hard drive frequently.

Thanks. Looking at Task Manager, I see that the CPU is running at 100%
during rendering and the pagefile is growing to about 800 MB from about 300
MB; also the free memory is getting a bit low - down to 50 MB at times. So
memory may well be an issue.

I'll have a look on Crucial's site and see how much an extra 512 MB would be
for this PC. Probably money well spent.

When I timed it earlier, I think I may have had the Pinnacle TV Centre
(digital TV app for grabbing to MPEG) open as well, which was probably not
very sensible!


I've just done my first big project, taking the commercial breaks out of
tonight's (repeated) episode of Lewis and burning it to DVD. It's rendering
a lot more quickly: it seems to be taking about 90 seconds to render every
60 seconds of video, which is faster than before when it was taking over two
minutes per minute of video. Probably the fact that I haven't got TV Centre
open is making the difference.


How robust is Studio 10? I've found that it quite often crashes, especially
when I go come out of a screen for configuring a transition such as a fade
or dissolve, or when saving a modified menu. Trimming the commercial breaks
from each part (six of them) took about 20 minutes, but I then spent another
hour orting out chapters and menus because the f-ing program kept crashing.
As always, "save your wsork frequently" is always a good motto - and save
each significant change to a *different* project is wise, in case of errors
during saving which woulf cock up the project.

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...
"Stuart" wrote in message
...

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...
I've jsut bought myself a Dazzle Hybrid Analogue/Digital Decoder and it
comes with Pinnacle Studio 10 SmartStart. I've been experimenting with
recording a programme and then editing out the commercials.

But the time taken to render the finished project is very slow: a
45-minute project has taken about 2 hours and it's still not quite
finished. It's the "Processing frame m of n" stage which is slow.

I captured as "DVD" format of MPG (*), as opposed to DVD Long Play, or
as any other file format, and I'm rendering at 100% quality, without any
compression to make it fit onto the DVD.

I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2
disk (and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on
the system disk.

The PC is a Pentium 4 3 GHz with 512 MB RAM.


How long *should* rendering take, typically?



* Using the Pinnacle TV Centre Pro softwa it says that this is the
best format to use if you are later burning to DVD - presumably because
it requires least post-procesing during rendering.

A suggestion - increase you physical RAM to 1 gig and set your virtual
memory to a minimum and maximum of 1.5gig
Should make quite a difference to rendering time. Also don't forget to
defrag your hard drive frequently.

Thanks. Looking at Task Manager, I see that the CPU is running at 100%
during rendering and the pagefile is growing to about 800 MB from about
300 MB; also the free memory is getting a bit low - down to 50 MB at
times. So memory may well be an issue.

I'll have a look on Crucial's site and see how much an extra 512 MB would
be for this PC. Probably money well spent.

When I timed it earlier, I think I may have had the Pinnacle TV Centre
(digital TV app for grabbing to MPEG) open as well, which was probably not
very sensible!


I've just done my first big project, taking the commercial breaks out of
tonight's (repeated) episode of Lewis and burning it to DVD. It's
rendering a lot more quickly: it seems to be taking about 90 seconds to
render every 60 seconds of video, which is faster than before when it was
taking over two minutes per minute of video. Probably the fact that I
haven't got TV Centre open is making the difference.


How robust is Studio 10? I've found that it quite often crashes,
especially when I go come out of a screen for configuring a transition
such as a fade or dissolve, or when saving a modified menu. Trimming the
commercial breaks from each part (six of them) took about 20 minutes, but
I then spent another hour orting out chapters and menus because the f-ing
program kept crashing. As always, "save your wsork frequently" is always a
good motto - and save each significant change to a *different* project is
wise, in case of errors during saving which woulf cock up the project.
Once you have the downloaded or captured mpeg file you could use a whole
range of programs to top n tail and edit out commercials - there is ProjectX
( a dog of a program to get your head around but fixes timecode breaks and
other errors and IMO is the best demuxer/cleaner-upper! and basic editor)
MPEGStreamclip also free more friendly than ProjectX. Then there is Womble
or VideRedo.

I edit and demux digital TV from my Topfield 5000 using ProjectX and then
remux and do any further tidying up in Womble, spitting out a MPEG2 file
that I run into ConvertXtoDVD.

and yes when I'm burning I don't multi-task beyond reading the odd email

"Stuart" wrote in message
...

A suggestion - increase you physical RAM to 1 gig and set your virtual
memory to a minimum and maximum of 1.5gig
Should make quite a difference to rendering time. Also don't forget to
defrag your hard drive frequently.

I've increased the RAM to 1 GB - I found some RAM that I'd ordered for a
customer who then decided not to upgrade: I'd forgotten all about it!

Surprisingly the increased RAM doesn't make any difference to the rendering
time. The page file goes from about 300 MB (without Studio 10 running) to
about 800 MB (Studio 10 running and rendering), with about 150 MB of
physical memory then available. The Commit Charge limit is about 2.5 GB.

However the CPU usage still goes straight to 100% (normally it idles at
arounf 1-2%) for the duration of the rendering - so it looks as CPU is the
rate-limiting step.

Still, extra RAM is always useful.

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...
"Stuart" wrote in message
...

A suggestion - increase you physical RAM to 1 gig and set your virtual
memory to a minimum and maximum of 1.5gig
Should make quite a difference to rendering time. Also don't forget to
defrag your hard drive frequently.

I've increased the RAM to 1 GB - I found some RAM that I'd ordered for a
customer who then decided not to upgrade: I'd forgotten all about it!

Surprisingly the increased RAM doesn't make any difference to the
rendering time. The page file goes from about 300 MB (without Studio 10
running) to about 800 MB (Studio 10 running and rendering), with about 150
MB of physical memory then available. The Commit Charge limit is about 2.5
GB.

However the CPU usage still goes straight to 100% (normally it idles at
arounf 1-2%) for the duration of the rendering - so it looks as CPU is the
rate-limiting step.

Still, extra RAM is always useful.
Rendering is CPU intensive each frame is read and temp saved then converted
and written to file then cleared from temp then repeated over and over
again. The best will be real time ie a 1 hour video will take 1 hour but
that's if no changes have been made to the original.
My old P2 would take all night for 10 mins. clip.

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...

I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2 disk
(and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on the
system disk.

There's your problem. Assuming you can put them on different drives, put the
VIDEO_TS folder on the system disk.

"G Hardy" wrote in message
...
"Mortimer" wrote in message
...

I've set the rendering and VIDEO_TS folders to be on an external USB2
disk (and it *is* running at USB2 speed!) so as to lighten the load on
the system disk.

There's your problem. Assuming you can put them on different drives, put
the VIDEO_TS folder on the system disk.

So out the render directory on one drive (external) and the VIDEO_TS
directory on another disk (eg C?

Will that actually help? The time is in populating the rendering folder
rather than the final copying from render to VIDEO_TS folder. Which drive
should the raw MPG files be on - the ones that make up the project? Should
they be on the render drive or the VIDEO_TS drive?

At present all three (source, render and VIDEO_TS) are on the external disk,
mainly to keep the system disk free for any pagefile access. Maybe there's a
better way of doing it. Sadly Studio 10 SmartStart doesn't have any PDFs of
manuals, and the help file doesn't seem to offer any advice on optimum setup
of disks.

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...
snip

At present all three (source, render and VIDEO_TS) are on the
external disk,

That is most certain to slow things up, having source and destination
on the same drive, even more so if they are in the same directory, can
you not use the system drive as either source of destination - failing
that, partition the external drive?

":Jerry:" wrote in message
reenews.net...

"Mortimer" wrote in message
...
snip

At present all three (source, render and VIDEO_TS) are on the external
disk,

That is most certain to slow things up, having source and destination on
the same drive, even more so if they are in the same directory, can you
not use the system drive as either source of destination - failing that,
partition the external drive?

So source and VIDEO_TS on system and render on external, so source to render
and render to VIDEO_TS are both copying from one drive to the other rather
from two parts of the same drive?

I think I went out of the frying pan into the fi originally I had
everything on the system drive and then I changed to have everything on the
external drive, so I was no better off! With a bit of thought I'd have
ensured that I was always copying from one drive to the other.

I'll try this tomorrow.