Does anyone have any ideas on how to speedup color renders.. Right now it's taking a whole night to render a single show on 4 different computers.... I'm rendering them out by segments... We have 24 episodes to render out in the next month... No room for errors huh?
I was thinking of adding a couple of extra ATI Graphics cards to a few of my work stations. Will color use all of the graphic cards to render or just one of them?
Re: Speeding Up Color Renders.... by walter biscardi on Mar 23, 2008 at 2:17:32 am
There is something fundamentally wrong with Color right now that Apple has not addressed. 22 minute episodes that used to take 90 minutes to 2 hours to render now take up to 6 hours to render. Not much different between them and I'm rendering on a faster computer with faster graphics.
This is something Apple has to address.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: Speeding Up Color Renders.... by Michael Sandness on Mar 24, 2008 at 3:22:32 pm
When I moved to Leopard. Rendering sped up 30-50% depending on format. DVCPro takes longer to render because its compressed. Also, how frames per second are you rendering. 720p60 is slower than 720p 24. In addition, the GPU has to sort out the compression, render, then write to the render format you choose. if you choose DVCPro HD, it's slow. Especially in interlaced. I always render DVCPro HD to ProRes HQ. Rendering to that is slower than going uncompressed but...hey...its smaller!
Uncompressed media actually renders faster in Color because Color has no codec to figure out. i rendered 15 min reels of uncompressed 444 10 bit RGB in 55 minutes.
Again, Leopard and Color make good friends!
Michael Sandness - Colorist
Splice Here, Minneapolis MN USA
Re: Speeding Up Color Renders.... by Jason Porthouse on Mar 24, 2008 at 9:58:17 pm
One thing I noticed on a recent project was that if I moved in to another app (Safari, for instance) on my system (MacPro 2.66/Tiger/FCPStudio2/QT7.4 with a Blackmagic Multibridge Pro) the renders sped up - not massively but noticeable. I'd say 10-15% faster - I assume because it's not sending to the monitor.
HTH
Jason
_________________________________
Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you'll be a mile away. And have his shoes.
Re: Do Color Renders use all 8 cores on new Mac Pro's?? by Mitch Sink on Mar 28, 2008 at 5:31:35 pm
Hi,
We are about to get a Mac Pro. I was leaning towards a 2.66 Dual Dual Core CPU's (total of 4 Cores). This would be partially to save money and partially because some of the Dual Quad Core (total of 8 cores) have random freezes and reboot when waking from sleep reported here (maybe the new boot ROM will fix these issues):
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/2008_mac_pro_reports.html#storytop
Now looking at the Color Render times in this thread I think maybe we should get one of the 8 Core machines. Do Color renders use all 8 Cores?
Re: Do Color Renders use all 8 cores on new Mac Pro's?? by Floh Peters on Mar 28, 2008 at 5:48:59 pm
We have 2 of the Jan08 8Core systems, and they don´t show any freezing problem (in fact I think they even get pretty hot).
Color does not use a lot of CPU power, since most of the processing is done on the GPUs. But with the current MacPro lineup I definitely would recommend getting an 8core system, since the 4 other CPUs can be helpful in many other areas. As far as I know the price benefit from downgrading to a 2*2core system is not that big.
Re: Do Color Renders use all 8 cores on new Mac Pro's?? by Mitch Sink on Mar 28, 2008 at 10:52:27 pm
[Floh Peters]"Color does not use a lot of CPU power, since most of the processing is done on the GPUs."
Thanks Floh! Exactly the information I needed.
" But with the current MacPro lineup I definitely would recommend getting an 8core system, since the 4 other CPUs can be helpful in many other areas. As far as I know the price benefit from downgrading to a 2*2core system is not that big."
Amazon is selling new 2.66 (four cores) with the default graphics card (based on the information you posted above a system with that card is probably not a good idea) for $2,050 after rebate.
A new 2.8 with 8 cores and the default graphics card is $2,650. For us (a non profit) $600 is substantial. But considering that the 2.8 comes with a better graphics card its probably a better choice.
OTH Apple is selling refurbed 3.0 (four cores) with the ATI 1900XT for $2,400. Since the XT1900 is a better card than the 2600 XT for Color Renders that might be a better choice than the 2.8 (decisions, decisions...).
Re: Just ordered an 8 Core Refurb - Thanks! by Mitch Sink on Mar 29, 2008 at 6:34:39 pm
Hi Floh,
Thank you for your information and advice.
I just ordered the following:
Your price: $2,399.00
Refurbished Mac Pro 8-core 2.8GHz Intel Xeon
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors
2GB (2 x 1GB) of 800MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM
320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s 7200-rpm hard drive
16x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB (two dual-link DVI ports)
I was initially planning on a 2.66 four Core model with the default graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT). The information you provided on the Graphics card rendering really helped me make this decision.
My reasoning is that I got a better card and twice as many cores for about $400. And if the card proves to be an impediment I can easily upgrade it later but upgrading from 4 Cores to 8 Cores is not an option.
