Haven't made a DVD for a while, maybe I've forgotten the reality, but...

I have a simple timeline with about 2 hours of HDV video on it.  I applied an overall color correction (using the clip | open native corrector), some audio adjustments, and let it render.  It took several hours as expected.

 Now I'm burning a standard DVD using a template that makes the iso file and burns the DVD, with Dolby sound, between in/out markers.  I checked the box to let it fit best quality onto the DVD (DVD -R disk).

It's crunching away with a time estimate of 26 hours and is 1% done.  I realize maybe the estimate will drop as it works longer, but I don't remember DVDs taking anywhere near that long to encode.  I have dual Zeon 2.8 GHz machine.  Total CPU utilization is around 40%.

Is this typical?

-SB

That makes no sense. Burning an SD DVD should take three hours or less (usually much less) whether the source material was HDV or not. Something is not correct. Are you sure the timeline was rendered (green slices) before you began burning the DVD?

Ok, I'll cancel it and start troubleshooting.

Yes, appears to be green slices.  My burn template is slightly customized.  I'll try a generic one to see if that makes a difference.

Last checked it is at 2% with 21 hours to go.

-SB

Actually the template may have been generic.

I'm going to try another experiment -- fuse the sequence to the source drive, put it on a new timeline, and burn from there.  Maybe the render folder and the DVD temp folder on same drive slowing it down???  Somehow that wouldn't account for such huge time, it seems computation bound.  Any ideas to try appreciated.

The source is on a newly installed SATA drive.  But the render files are on another drive, I would assume those are used for encoding the .iso file.

-SB

I fused the sequence, which took about 20 to 30 minutes back to the source drive.  I would have hoped that would have been faster also because I thought fusing a rendered timeline should be similar to copying a file.  But maybe that's how long it takes with such big files (it created a 20 Gig .m2v file).

Now I created another sequence and put the fused file on it, and proceded to start burning a DVD.  It seems to be going extremely slowing again - the dialog box says "Exporting frame..." and the frames do not increment nearly as fast as you would want, maybe 10 to 15 frames a second.  The initial time estimate was 29 hours but dropped fairly soon to 21 hours.

There must be something wrong here, but what?

I'll try to check CPU speed for the heck of it.

-SB

Maybe the estimate is deceiving...

The export seems to be going at (conservatively) 10 frames/sec (eyeballing it).

Material is 1 hour 50 minutes long = 110 minutes,  x 60 = 6600 seconds, * 30 fps = 198000 frames total.

At 10 fps, time estimate is (198000 / 10) seconds = 19800, /60 = 330 minutes, /60 = 5.5 hours, which doesn't seem as dire.

But I still want to make sure it is running efficiently by any tests recommended.

-SB

I've found that the TmpGe stuff is hugely faster encoding HDV to SDDVD or BD. One hour of HDV takes a hour or so to BD or DVD. I get similar times with one pass DVDitHD. Both apps seem to max out my 4 core AMD 940 during encoding. My experience with Liquid runs less than 50% processor load.

Are you still on 6.1??? In that case, these long render times may be correct. 7.2 has a much faster render engine.

LewS:

Are you still on 6.1??? In that case, these long render times may be correct. 7.2 has a much faster render engine.

No, I'm running the latest 7.2 update as far as I know.

Could you at some point start a DVD process on an HDV timeline (all green) and estimate the framerate (by timing a few hundred frames), just for comparison, and note the CPU you are using and %CPU usage?  That might help me know if something is seriously out of whack.

Regards,

-SB

TVJohn:

I've found that the TmpGe stuff is hugely faster encoding HDV to SDDVD or BD. One hour of HDV takes a hour or so to BD or DVD. I get similar times with one pass DVDitHD. Both apps seem to max out my 4 core AMD 940 during encoding. My experience with Liquid runs less than 50% processor load.

That is another good idea.  What is your workflow?  Do you fuse a file and feed that to TmpGe?

I have a TmpGenc version, not sure if it will take an HDV fused file.

-SB

I have both TmpGe Express 4 and TmpGe Authoring Works 4. They are updated frequently and I can recommend them as good add-ons for a Liquid user. I fuse the HDV timeline video in the standard 30p 1440 x 1080. I fuse the audio separately as pcm sound 16 bit 48khz, then import into AWE4. 

Some more stats to ponder:

I am now at 18% done with 17 hours 56 remaining.  It has been running for about 3 1/2 to 4 hours.

The dialog box says "at 01:04:20.10", which I think means how far along the timeline.  The material ends at 1:55, so that would suggest I'm about 56% done with this step;  does that mean another big step is remaining to account for the 18% total?  Burning usually goes fast.  Because the timeline is green, I would think no rendering is necessary, just iso encoding.

The frames indicate 113000 of 201535, which confirms the 56%.

But even if I'm at 56%, that means it will take at 7 or 8 hours total, which still seems an awful lot.

I'd be interested in anyone reporting their frame rate while in the "make DVD" process from a green timeline.

Regards,

-SB

If something like this would happen to me, I would start a new project. Make from the captured video a small TL, for about 4 minutes length. Then try to make a DVD from it.

That would me give at least an idea if it is the current project or not.

Furthermore, I never "play around" with the settings, unless I know what I'm doing. The defaults should be used in the first attempt to make a DVD. SD or HD, no further discussion.

There is maybe an obvious reason for a long DVD production. Did you change the TL settings for your video (i.e. not the default HD settings)?

I can imagine that your TL is continously re-rendered.

I did a fuse and put on new timeline and the DVD burn process did not seem to go much faster, somewhere around 10 to 12 frames a second.  I think maybe that's as fast as Liquid can encode an HDV timeline to ISO format on my computer.  CPU usage around 40%.

 It did turn out that the burn finished well before the ominous "21 hours" estimate.  I wasn't around to see it finish, but maybe 7 to 8 hours was the time.

That still is pretty darn long, so I'll probably look into a faster solution like TmpGenc.  Maybe it will pay for itself in electricity bills.

 At least once the ".iso" file is created it burns at the expected rate, so no problem cranking out DVDs.  Woe is me if I don't choose one of the  "make iso file" options when making the DVD.

Still interested in others' frame rates when encoding an "iso" DVD file from an HDV timeline (all green) with Liquid.

 Regards,

-SB

simonbaker:

Still interested in others' frame rates when encoding an "iso" DVD file from an HDV timeline (all green) with Liquid.

 Regards,

-SB

About 90 % of the length of the timeline the last time I did it, was some time ago but still the same machine

mjolnarn:

simonbaker:

Still interested in others' frame rates when encoding an "iso" DVD file from an HDV timeline (all green) with Liquid.

 Regards,

-SB

About 90 % of the length of the timeline the last time I did it, was some time ago but still the same machine

 

Wow -- that would mean about 33 fps.  Was that an HDV timeline?

 

OK, I am going to start rendering a DVD ISO file from a 47-minute HDV timeline (my Bentley Rally project) This is an HDV 2 timeline (1440 x 1080 29.97fps). The timeline itself is rendered (all green slices). Will report back when the render is completed. It is 5:35 PM EDT here now.

It is 7:30 and I just walked in and the ISO file was finished. So, it actually took less than 2 hours to complete. CPU usage looked to average about 70%.

It all seems pretty fast to me.

LewS:

OK, I am going to start rendering a DVD ISO file from a 47-minute HDV timeline (my Bentley Rally project) This is an HDV 2 timeline (1440 x 1080 29.97fps). The timeline itself is rendered (all green slices). Will report back when the render is completed. It is 5:35 PM EDT here now.

It is 7:30 and I just walked in and the ISO file was finished. So, it actually took less than 2 hours to complete. CPU usage looked to average about 70%.

It all seems pretty fast to me.

 Thanks, that's valuable info.   

I may need to tune something up on my machine, unless your CPU is just faster and manages threads better.  Is the system in your profile the one you did the test on?

Actually, the times are not radically different, although your CPU usage is almost double mine -- but perhaps you have a single CPU and because mine is a dual CPU the same workload is reported as half as much (I'm assuming the process can only use one thread).  And your CPU is a bit faster than one of mine.

Much appreciated! 

-SB

From my profile:

3.15GHz E8500 CPU, Intel MB w P35 chipset, 4GB memory, Pioneer DVD burner, onboard audio, nVidia 8800GTS w 512MB, 2TB (4 x 500GB) Raid 0 on Promise controller, 4 SATA removeable drive bays in addition to the Raid drives

From what I read in this thread it seems like this render was twice as fast as what you are getting.

LewS:

From my profile:

3.15GHz E8500 CPU, Intel MB w P35 chipset, 4GB memory, Pioneer DVD burner, onboard audio, nVidia 8800GTS w 512MB, 2TB (4 x 500GB) Raid 0 on Promise controller, 4 SATA removeable drive bays in addition to the Raid drives

From what I read in this thread it seems like this render was twice as fast as what you are getting.

If your encoding took, say, 110 minutes, then it is working at 47/110 =  43% of real time.  I figured mine is going at about 33% of real time if my observation of about 10 frames per second is accurate.  I wasn't actually able to clock the completion.  But maybe you are going closer to 50% realtime.  Using a stopwatch on the frame counter and observing for a minute or so would be a good way to compare.

Your CPU is about 12.5% faster than mine, so factoring that in, I'm not sure there is anything I can tweak to get faster encoding.  But if there is, I would like to know and take advantage of it, because a 2 hour DVD must be taking around 6 hours to encode if running at 1/3 real time.

Regards,

-SB

I agree. The render time on my system is about 50% of realtime. That seems pretty good. I have no idea what you could tweak to improve your render times.

I still miss the correct description of how simon has built his Tiumeline.

 

In my opinion, the problem lies in the procedure. My machine is not so fast as Lew's machine, but rendertimes for producing HD ISO files from a 1 hour project, cost me no more than 3-4 hours. Up to finishing the ISO.

 

So:

1. what is your medi in raw (camera, Ilink, Firewire connection etc.

2. what are your TL settings for the HD material. Do the clips render first or are they already in the correct setting (already green).

3. did you add video material from "outside" in what format? Photo's, picture's etc.

4. did you add ProDAD functions, like Mercalli or Vitascene?id you change one or more settings for making the ISO (also sound tracks)?

5. and finally, what are the render times for short movies, like 5 minutes.

 

 

Sef:

I still miss the correct description of how simon has built his Tiumeline.

 

In my opinion, the problem lies in the procedure. My machine is not so fast as Lew's machine, but rendertimes for producing HD ISO files from a 1 hour project, cost me no more than 3-4 hours. Up to finishing the ISO.

 

So:

1. what is your medi in raw (camera, Ilink, Firewire connection etc.

2. what are your TL settings for the HD material. Do the clips render first or are they already in the correct setting (already green).

3. did you add video material from "outside" in what format? Photo's, picture's etc.

4. did you add ProDAD functions, like Mercalli or Vitascene?id you change one or more settings for making the ISO (also sound tracks)?

5. and finally, what are the render times for short movies, like 5 minutes.

This was a very simple project, but long timeline -- about 1 hour 55 minutes.  If your 1 hour project takes 3 to 4 hours, then for a 2 hour project 6 to 8 hours would be comparable to my iso encoding.  However, you may be including rendering the timeline -- I'm just talking about making the ".iso" and burning the DVD.

I just had two clips, each from an approx 1 hour HDV tape.  I put them on a 59.94 1080i HDV timeline, applied color correction to both of them which required rendering.  I also used the audio editor extensively to adjust sound.  I put a simple title at the beginning and between the two clips.  At the very end I had a freeze frame and dissolve to black.  No cuts or fancy stuff.

The timeline was rendered to green before making the DVD ".iso" file.

I like the idea of timing a very short project just to get the basic rate.  I'll make an iso file for a 100 second segment of the project and time it.

-SB

Ok, I did a more exact timing test.

I did a "burn DVD" process, just to make the ".iso" file; in other words, did not include the burning of the DVD.

I chose "between mark in and mark out" and used the first 100 seconds of the project (+/- 1 frame).

It took 5 minutes and 52 seconds to process the 3000 frames, plus a few seconds more finish the iso file.

So I'm running very close to 33% of real time.  I specified the destination iso file to be put on a different drive from the render drive, hoping that would be more efficient.

Because in the past my CPU has overheated when running at 100%, I checked the CPU speed with some free programs.  It seems to be running at the specified 2.8 GHz.  However, I know it is possible to configure memory access parameters with different wait states, which maybe affects processing speed, so I'll check into that if I can.

----------------------------------

Other observations:

I wanted to run the test twice in case there was some startup sluggishness due to windows paging, etc.  When I ran the second time, it took 0 seconds!!!  So I looked around, and discovered what I'm sure is well-known to all (and maybe me once upon a time), that LE seems to build a bunch of temporary files on the render drive (under folder DVD, the .m2v, etc. files) that ultimately are used to make the iso file.  So LE was smart enough to know I wanted the same burn and went straight to its cache of temporary files, no "rendering" needed.

So that gets me thinking that maybe it would be faster if we could specify a different drive for these temporary files, because it is probably using the rendered timeline as source (which is on the render drive I assume), and then writing the temporary files to the same drive.  However, I don't know if the I/O is much of a hangup, but it is perhaps a minor tweak that could shave some time. 

But my question is:  is it possible to specify a separate drive for the DVD temporary files that is different from the render drive?

Also, on the render drive, under the project there is a folder called "Alternate".  Does anyone know what that is for?

Regards,

-SB

 

 

I'm in PAL and my TL for 100 secs of video, is 2500 frames. They were exported to ISO in 4'10" That is almost the same speed.  My CPU is 2.4 gHz and a double core.

Maybe a defrag of the render disk could improve the speed.

Facit: long timelines require long ISO producing times.

But then, the problem for overheating is a seriouis one. Lucky, my system has no problems with this.