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1. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 8, 2013 6:44 PM (in response to S Kendall)It does seems wrong. What version of encore? Is any part of the project dynamic link? What version of PR/AME?
How many animated buttons on the menu you used for the test? What is the source video for the timeline for any animated buttons? For any background video for the menu?
I just did a 30 second motion menu with 4 animated buttons and a background video, all 1920x1080. 4 minutes. Not a big system i7 930 24GB nonCuda video card.
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2. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
S Kendall Nov 8, 2013 7:46 PM (in response to Stan Jones)Sorry Stan, I should have listed those things in the first post.
I'm using Premiere Pro CC (v 7.0.1), AME CC (v 7.0.1.58 64-bit) and Encore CS6 (v 6.0.2.004), so no dynamic linking.
The Video files I'm using for the background are from Precomposed Media's (http://www.precomposed.com/) templates out of After Effects. They are 1920x1080 29.97i .MOV files using the Quicktime Animation codec at 100.
There are 9 buttons total on each scene menu (6 scenes, a next, back and main menu button), but there actually aren't any animated buttons since I rendered all of the scene thumbnails into the background .MOV file using After Effects.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
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3. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 8, 2013 8:13 PM (in response to S Kendall)Their support has generally been very good, so I would pose the question to them also.
Since you are already putting your thumbnails in via AE, I wonder if you can work around this by making all the menu changes, other than highlights there. Then transcode the menu background outside Encore. When Encore only has highlights and a background video, it should not render the menu at all.
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4. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
S Kendall Nov 8, 2013 8:48 PM (in response to Stan Jones)I'd love to try that. How would I make it so that the buttons are still the full size of the video thumbnails (to help with selecting buttons if the disc was being played back on a computer, for instance)? If I'm only using the highlights, wouldn't the buttons be no larger than the size of the highlights? Or is there a way to change the size of the button area to fit the video thumbnail without actually having an object in the folder other than the highlight(s)?
I'm very familar and comoftable with editing the menu files in Photoshop.
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5. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
S Kendall Nov 8, 2013 9:38 PM (in response to S Kendall)Success!
Happy to report that I changed the option in Encore to use AME to transcode, then I changed the preset for all of the pre-rendered backgrounds to "1920x1080 29.97i Maximum Quality" rather than "Automatic Best Quality Based on Project Settings" and forced them to transcode in the project before building the disc image, and the renders took virtually no time at all.
The entire build finished in about 20 minutes.
Not sure if it was just changing the option to use AME or if it was a combination of those things, but I'm so relived that I don't have to wait 4 hours on a 30 second menu to render anymore!
Thanks for your help and input, Stan.
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6. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 9, 2013 4:43 AM (in response to S Kendall)Congratulations!
My understanding has been that AME is only used for the "transcode now" elements, which does not include menus. BUT you are simply transcoding video assets, and timeline or not, they can use the AME option,. So whether they were further transcoded by Encore as part of the menu build or not, it clearly had a huge impact on what was slowing you down.
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7. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
S Kendall Nov 9, 2013 9:43 AM (in response to Stan Jones)Thanks Stan. As for that other issue, I think I figured out a way to make a button with just a highlight in it, larger than the size of the highlight alone so that it fills the entire space of the video thumbnail (that was pre-rendered in the menu background video). If I make a box and make the opacity 1%, include it on the same layer as the highlight, that seems to work. Is there a better solution for this?
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8. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 9, 2013 9:53 AM (in response to S Kendall)As long as it is included in a highlight (=1, =2, etc) layer, it should be fine.
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9. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
S Kendall Nov 9, 2013 12:38 PM (in response to Stan Jones)Correction.
Ok, I need to make a correction. Turns out that the reason it built so fast was because of what you were talking about, Stan, that I only had highlights and therefore the motion menus weren't rendering at all.
So it would seem that rendering the menus is still taking forever. I guess I will keep this workflow of rendering everything in After Effects and only adding the highlights in Encore.
I still have no idea why it takes so long to render the menus in Encore. I can transcode the 30 second 1920x1080 motion menu backgrounds in AME in about a minute or so.
Strange.
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10. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 9, 2013 12:57 PM (in response to S Kendall)The dramatic difference does seem strange. Glad there is a workaround that gets the job done.
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11. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
makdm1 Nov 26, 2013 4:47 PM (in response to S Kendall)Having a similar issue with the Zip Kit templates from Precomposed... the Zip Kits are supposed to be prerendered and faster to build. But I'm still having the same issue as you-- extremely slow render times for the motion menus. Now I'm trying to see if I can simply associate a still frame image for use as the menu backgrounds in Encore. Defeats the purpose of getting animated backgrounds but I also can't wait 4 hours to render a Blu-ray!
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12. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 26, 2013 5:28 PM (in response to makdm1)If you remove the motion asset from the menu, is there still a background? (I assume no.)
Are you sure there is not a static background in the package you got?
Select the motion asset in the project panel, right click, New -> Timeline. In the timeline, find the frame you want as the background, Timeline -> Save Frame as File. then import that as Asset. Add that as the background.
Any feedback from precomposed on this?
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13. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
makdm1 Nov 26, 2013 6:36 PM (in response to makdm1)** UPDATE: I was able to get things rendering much faster by making sure the menus were set to transcode as MPEG-2, 1920x1080, 29.97fps (Precomposed apparently mentions this needs to be set up this way right off the bat in their tutorial), even if the rest of the assets are 720p or standard-def size. My only concern is now if the resulting blu-ray will be sized for the full 1080 versus the 720p size that my project was edited in.
Anyway, another snafu that I found that really semed to fix the speed/rendering issue is to check the durations set for the menus in the Motion tabs -- they should match the durations of the animated background files from Precomposed but I found the first two menu durations were set to over 32 minutes for some reason! So Encore was apparently trying to render out a huge size file to fit that duration! Once I corrected the menu motion durations, the project rendered a LOT faster.
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14. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
S Kendall Nov 26, 2013 7:40 PM (in response to makdm1)I have made sure my settings were what the guys at Precomposed recommended (MPEG-2, 1920x1080, 29.97fps), but still got poor results rendering the motion menus in Encore.
This was the response I got from Precomposed:
Unfortunately Encore is not the most efficient rendering application. Several factors cause it to take much longer to render in Encore, such as the number of scene boxes per page, and the codec of your main video. Despite it taking a little more time to setup in After Effects, I highly recommend that method over using Encore to render video into the scene boxes. If this creates too much work for you, you may want to consider reducing the number of chapters so you only have a page or two to configure.
I don't think the codec of my main video (which is h.264) makes a difference in the speed of the motion menus rendering, but who knows. Anyway, his answer didn't offer any other suggestions. Just that I'm basically better off rendering everything in After Effects.
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15. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 26, 2013 8:07 PM (in response to makdm1)I was able to get things rendering much faster by making sure the menus were set to transcode as MPEG-2, 1920x1080, 29.97fps (Precomposed apparently mentions this needs to be set up this way right off the bat in their tutorial), even if the rest of the assets are 720p or standard-def size.
Are your timelines MPEG2 or H264?
I do not think the size is a problem. Encore/BD handles timelines (and menus) being different sizes.
The duration mismatch is odd, and would certainly slow down your menu transcoding!
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16. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Nov 26, 2013 8:11 PM (in response to S Kendall)I don't think the codec of my main video (which is h.264) makes a difference in the speed of the motion menus rendering, but who knows.
I suspect it does. Encore's transcode engine is from the sonic core, and does not take advantage of adobe media encoder. (Even if that option is selected, it is only for "transcode now" - meaning timelines.) With H264 timelines, encore must decode before generating the new menu background and then transcoding.
Did you see any difference as makdm1 in the menu durations?
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17. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
S Kendall Dec 7, 2013 7:41 PM (in response to Stan Jones)Stan Jones wrote:
I don't think the codec of my main video (which is h.264) makes a difference in the speed of the motion menus rendering, but who knows.
I suspect it does. Encore's transcode engine is from the sonic core, and does not take advantage of adobe media encoder. (Even if that option is selected, it is only for "transcode now" - meaning timelines.) With H264 timelines, encore must decode before generating the new menu background and then transcoding.
Did you see any difference as makdm1 in the menu durations?
Fixed!
I wanted to post an update to this since I'm working on a new project and wanted to give it one more shot by exporting out my main Blu-ray video using MPEG-2 rather than H.264 as Stan suggested. I am happy to report that this did, indeed fix the problem! The motion menus are now taking about 1-2 minutes to render out (compared with the ridiculous 4 hours it used to take). Now if only my computer would quit blue-screening when I'm rendering out the MPEG-2 videos from Premiere using Media Encoder, but I'll save that problem for another thread.
Thanks Stan.
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18. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Dec 8, 2013 9:42 AM (in response to S Kendall)Excellent! Thanks for reporting back.
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19. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
srukweza Jan 17, 2014 8:44 AM (in response to Stan Jones)I have just had this problem with a project with a precomposed menu kit 15. I exported my files as Blu ray H264 from Premiere and exported my menu backgrounds from After Effects. but the render times has taken about 19 hour just rendering scene menus which are four in this case and there are also 2 other menus the main and the special features. I think I may have to try exporting the main videos as blu ray mpeg 2 from Premiere Pro.
So in this case who uses blu ray H264 if the render times are so ridiculous long?
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20. Re: Extremely Slow Menu Rendering - Only Using 5-20% CPU
Stan Jones Jan 17, 2014 7:01 PM (in response to srukweza)I have assumed that Precomposed is only referring to the motion menus as MPEG2-BD (i.e. the project default transcode setting); not the timeline videos.
I'm not sure from what you are saying whether you are exporting from AE as MPEG2-BD or dynamic linking from AE and setting the Encore default to MPEG2-BD. And in any event, why would you need to change your timeline assets?




