Long render times for WMV-HD

[JC/DV]

OK, using Vegas 7, I made my full edit which is 54 minutes long. I rendered that out to HDV MPG. Started a new project and inserted that render into the timeline. Set the thing to render to WMV 720p using the template... It is currently at 42% and has been running for 6 Hours 21 Minutes and has 8 Hours and 43 Minutes left!!! (I set it this morning and went to some see some family with my Dad and just got in.)

I notice that it is running through 30 frames fine then pauses for 13 seconds then goes through another 30 frames then pauses for 13 more seconds. I didn't apply ANYTHING to the file in the timeline... what's up?

My thinking it has something to do with the seconds per keyframe in the render settings... any other ideas? For some reason I don't remember this taking so long before...

[RatVega]

Thing one: Transcoding HD is always going to seem slow; most of us aren't used to dealing with a format 3-7 times the size of DV.

As far as the "30 frames, pause 13 seconds" thing, I'm guessing that 30 frames is "the mouthful" and 13 seconds is the "chewing time". Apparently, the "spitting it out" is quick. ;) There is a massive amount of math in these conversions, so the mouthful equates to the buffer size for the floating point unit and the chewing relates to the absolute performance (gigaFLOPS) of a given system.

I see a similar "cycling" when rendering HD in Shake (where the "big kids" are using render farms...)

[JC/DV]

The 1080 MPG went much much faster than the WMV went, but I guess there is more computations that go on making the WMV compression. I know one thing, I won't be rendering a full WMV HD again unless the client pays me for 12 hours of rendering...

[hdvbymark]

I routinely release in WMV-HD. I just finished a 55-minute wedding video which I rendered out in mpg2 for a regular widescreen DVD and a 1080p WMV-HD file of the same playing time. I aquire and edit HDV and use Vegas 7d on a Dell notebook with 2.16 GHz Core Duo with 2 GB RAM.

The DVD file render went faster than real time, maybe about 40 minutes. I did that first to make sure there were no errors in the show.

Rendering of the 1080p video took 14 hours. I started at 6 am and it finished at 8 pm, and it rendered without t glich.

I authored Widescreen DVD in DVD Architect, and released the HD version by burning the 3.6 GB file to a separate DVD blank, with a README on how to connect computer to HDTV for playback. For short shows, I put the HD version in a bonus folder of the DVD.

[BruceR]

I've tried both, wnd9 HD and Divx HD. Both will go on a regular DVD and burn with your dvd burner. You might get 60 minutes on a wnd HD disc but 2hrs on a Divx HD disc. Took my fast computer about 3 hours to do the windows disk of a 10 minute HDV file and 45 minutes to do the same thing to Divx. They both will play HD on a dvd player that plays wnd9 HD and divx HD for about $250. You can put menus on the divx one also. See www.divx.com (http://www.divx.com) you can download a 30 day trail. If you want to see a divx HD one I did to experment with go to this link http://stage6.divx.com/members/10781/videos The Jeff and Rita one.
You'll have to download the webplayer first(about a minute).
It takes a while to buffer because the file size is larger then SD video but you can play a little of it to see the quailty after 5% buffers. It also will play full screen on your monitor.

Bruce :cool2:

[JC/DV]

I played with divx awhile back... basically, I'm just going to now worry about it and possibly look into going BluRay if I keep selling the HD Upgrades.

I have printed back to tape in HD for a guy who bought an HC1 so he can see it in HD now and not have to wait.