Been searching everywhere.. Rendering Standard 1080p Video how can I speed it up.

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hi I joined the forum so that i could spend a few days reading about your rendering options…
I will start at the beginning…

I make Videos for the following subjects.
Dash Camera Reviews and Videos or recovery’s and near misses. I am a Mobile Mechanic.
Lock Picking Videos, sound boring but Like the hobby of lock picking, its all to do with puzzles.
Soon plan of doing more reviews on all sorts of new gadgets.

All my videos are in 1080p at the moment, but also have 2304x1296 video in my new dash camera.
My videos are at 18000 bps but I output them at 12000 bps.
I like to output using the preset Xvid, have tryed AVI H264 mode but find YouTube messes with the video and makes it more blocky. I use MP3 as the audio output as this is easy to use and seems to get the best result.

My machine I have the i7-477k 3.5Ghz processor 256 Gb SSD for boot and one for the video processing and as a Scratch disk, I also have a 2Tb with the 64gb SSD built in. making transfers faster.
My graphic card is the Gforce 470 GTX
I have 8Gb of High speed ram, and am running on windows 8.1 64bit fully updated.

My machine takes around 2-3 seconds to boot from cold sometimes less then 2 seconds. my screen is running at 1080p on a 32 inch monitor.

I have loads of software for editing videos, Blender is the first choice version 2.69. I also have Adobe premier as this is much easier to edit short clips in but it has some major flaws. like not handling my Canon 650d video and my GoPro style camera footage.

Now the problem I am having.

Most of my dash cam videos consist of 1080p video with a simple splash screen in between the footage, so nothing special. normally about 10 minutes of footage in all maximum most of the time its around 3 mins at 30fps. My lock picking videos normally range from 3-10 minutes they are at 25 fps.

A video takes around 20-30 mins to process at the moment. this is around a 6-8 minute video.

I have been through the settings in blender for memory. and tried using the graphic card to render. and set it to use all 8 cores of the processor. and increased the ram available.

my machine while rendering uses max 25% of any core and only uses a maximum of 300Mb of ram, my system and things are using 1gb of ram give or take 200Mb. and I am not using any real processing power.

Can anyone suggest any better settings or any options that are to do with the 3d rendering that could be turned off to make processing better. VSDC Free Video Editor can render the same sort of video in around 5 mins, but its output is often missing bits and it will sometimes crash out. premier can also output slightly faster but it wont handle the input video so i have to run it through OBS or blender first to make it compatible. (also a transition in this is not like blender eg the video does not move accros the screen it is very 2d)

Sorry for the long post but Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers Peter.:slight_smile:

2

I have been through the settings in blender for memory. and tried using the graphic card to render. and set it to use all 8 cores of the processor. and increased the ram available.
I assume you are using the video sequence editor in blender. This does not use the gpu for rendering. The gpu can be used for the cycles render engine to render the 3d viewport.

Suggestions to speed up rendering from the VSE http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/7738/how-to-make-vse-render-faster

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Thanks for the Information about the GPU… I have found that running the video through the GPU was slightly slower in some respects then the 8 core CPU, however if I have lots of short clips with 3d transitions eg video flipping over or Sliding into the screen the GPU processed faster.
When I first installed blender it worked faster using the GPU as the threads (cores) were set on default.

I have read the page in the link. I have tried pre-fetching on settings varying from 50 - 500 its currently set on the maximum of 500 cache is set to 6000 Mb. as I have over 7000 Mb of ram available.

I just edited my sons driving lesson last night. (we set the camera upside down. DOH…)
The video is 30 Mins long and took nearly 7 hours to turn the right way up the Bit rate was set at 9000 as the footage was recorded at that rate. Unfortunately after I had left it processing took from about 6 in the afternoon finished some time after 1 am before 2 am I then realised the audio was accidentally set to AC3 never managed to get that to work so the result was no audio had to do the thing again. It was still going at 7 am.

Finally after more then 12 hours I have processed a 30 minute video from upside down to the right way up.

Can anyone help?

I have made it process the video without displaying the video while processing using keep UI, this did not seem to make much of a difference anyway.

4

You could have used the flip Xy properties of the video strip in the VSE. No additional rendering required. Sorry. Also you could have added the original audio to the rerendered footage (make a meta strip) and cut them together.

5

thought once the video had been flipped you had to re render it anyway. I also had to edit out the first little bit where we were setting the angle up. and the camera records the audio slightly out of sync with the footage. I have had to adjust this by hand around 20 frames out.

We did buy him the cheap camera but the video footage quality is quite high and the audio picked everything up clearly…

The problem I have is that when processing the videos. When my blender is processing you open the thread (processor) monitor and the computer (every function) still only uses a maximum of 20% processing power. Blender is only using one thread out of 8 of the processor. It is also only using a maximum of 300mb of RAM, according to system monitor. Leaving 6-7 Gb free for other applications.

Put it this way. I have tried playing Battlefield 4 at the same time and there is no real slowdown of rendering or game play at 1080p (game play and rendering footage) still getting smooth video and takes maybe 1% more time. The only thing that makes the game play bad is that I am using a 32inch HD tv as a monitor so my refresh rate is like 100ms instead of 5ms. This is the TV side not the computers output side.