Skip navigation
PeterTaps
PeterTaps Calculating status...
Currently Being Moderated

Rendering takes overnight. Hardware recommendation.

Apr 19, 2012 4:19 PM

Folks,

 

We are using CS5 to take still images and render into a MP4 video file. The original images take about 3 TB of space and the rendered movie is usually about 25G in size.

 

The problem we have is that the rendering takes about 8+ hours. The problem gets exacerbated when we realize that we made a mistake in syncing some audio parts incorrectly and have to start over the process. The syncing problems are common and have to be adjusted manually.

 

We would like to reduce the rendering time as much as possible and have a reasonably good budget for putting together a PC. I am wondering if anyone has any experience setting up an ultimate PC machine for rendering.

 

1. We were thinking of getting 64G DDR3 RAM. How much would this matter?

2. Does Adobe CS take advantage of GPU? We could put in a high end nVidia graphics card with 2G DDR5 memory.

3. Does Adobe CS take advantage of multi-core processors? Thinking of getting a quad-core i7 processor.

4. Would it reduce the time significantly if we use a SSD drive to write the output. We can't do much on the input size. We are delivered three 1TB disks with the still images.

 

Obviously, all the above things would probably help. However, don't want to get disappointed to find out that, after all the investment, our rendering time went down by only one hour. We would like to see the total rendering time in the range of 2-3 hours.

 

I guess the fundamental question to ask is where does Adobe CS spend most of its time during rendering. Perhaps just getting 64G RAM may be sufficient.

 

If there are any Adobe marketing guys lurking around this forum, please contact me. This could be a good case study to showcase. We could work on it together.

 

Regards,

Peter

414 Views   1 Reply   Latest reply: Mylenium, Apr 21, 2012 9:04 AM
 
Replies
  • Mylenium
    Currently Being Moderated
    1. Mylenium,
    Apr 21, 2012 9:04 AM   in reply to PeterTaps
    Report

    The technically correct answer to your questions: No, Yes, Yes, No. The correct answer to your implied questions: No, No, No, No. Sorry buddy, other than getting the fastest processor you can get, nothing will speed up your encoding because:

     

    • Hardware acceleration only exists inside the programs for interactive editing and display purposes.
    • "headless" apps like Adobe Media Encoder never even initialize GPU features.
    • There are some hardware accelerated encoding features e.g. in Premiere Pro and with CS6 there may be even more, but at the end of the day, all of those are still dependent on specific settings/ encoding presets and may not at all work for your case.
    • Encoding to most output formats is strictly linear and thus single threaded to begin with.
    • SSDs only get faster with lots of small I/O transfers, not huge files. Anything that your existing RAID can't handle, an SSD won't cure, either.
    • RAM outfit is neglectible. No program on this planet loads data into RAM when direct stream processing is just as efficient.

     

    So whatever you do, you cannot expect miracles. You may be able to shave off half of the time on a sparkly new machine with a fast RAID and the speediest core7i on the market, but everything else won't influence the result much, even more so as long as you only move in the confines of exporting and converting your Adobe projects directly and cannot resort  to alternative tools for encoding...

     

    Mylenium

     
    |
    Mark as:
Actions

More Like This

  • Retrieving data ...

Bookmarked By (0)

Answers + Points = Status

  • 10 points awarded for Correct Answers
  • 5 points awarded for Helpful Answers
  • 10,000+ points
  • 1,001-10,000 points
  • 501-1,000 points
  • 5-500 points