Quad Core G5 MPEG-2 render times

Trying to find other things to do while waiting for Compressor to finish a 28-hour render of a 2:22:00 DV based production on my 1GHz G4 eMac with a Gig of RAM.

We're using FCP 4.5HD, Compressor and DVDSP 3.0.2

REALLY want to know how the new Quad Core 2.7GHz machines do on cutting render times for this sort of thing.

Anyone have some real-life numbers and experiences to share?

I might get an early Christmas Present if there's a major shortening of time, especially with several 1-hour plus productions that need a pre-Christmas delivery.

Thanks,

Ted.



Post Edited (12-18-05 21:50)

Twenty-eight hours of rendering for less than three hours of media? That's awfully slow. Are you assigning all available system resources to the process or are you multi-tasking? Even without a Quad, when I worked on a Dual 2.8GHz G5 export on average 120-150 minutes of dailies to MPEG-2, it took more like an hour for two hours of media.

"when I worked on a Dual 2.8GHz G5" WHA?

"the new Quad Core 2.7GHz machines do" HuH?

The fastest G5 ever was is 2.7 Ghz and the Quads are dual core 2.5 Ghz.

Typo, typo. My own machine is just a Dual 2.0GHz, so I remembered the office machine wrong.

I ran into this also with a 4 minute music video. Compressor took several hours to render when output directly from FCP.

When I output a referenced QT and compressed from that, compressor took about 6 minutes.

Export - Using Compressor sometimes flat-out fails. Works for some (such as the two places I worked where we were using FCP5 with Compressor 2), and doesn't work for others (eg. my home G5/FCP4.5/Compressor combo). Sometimes you have to export a full-quality QuickTime movie first. And self-contained movies are more stable than reference movies, though if you have no trouble with the latter, you can certainly go ahead.

Rendering is a processor-speed thing, so the Quad would probably get better results. Just the G5 will speed you up a great deal, and once the Quad comes out, it may make the Dual G5 a good purchase based on, ahem, becoming second banana.

Unfortunately, if you export a quicktime movie first before going to compressor, you won't be able to carry your chapter markers over to DVDSP. It took me weeks to figure out what was going on because I had issues with the Export using Compressor function in 4.0. But, for me at least, it got fixed in 4.5 and I've been happy as a clam when I need to transfer chapter markers.

Of course if I don't need markers, I still do it as Derek suggests. Old habits die hard I suppose.

Andy

The QUAD 2.5 (there is no Quad 2.7) is almost twice as fast as the previous top model, the Dual 2.7 and more the double the Dual 2.5. To give you an idea how fast this machine is, I just rendered a 5 second Z-Depth-heavy / Motion Blurry After Effects project on my Dual 1 Ghz = 2 & 1/2 hrs. I moved it over to my new Quad 2.5 with the same AE software & plug-ins = 16 minutes for the exact same project.

If you are a grafix-heavy user, screw the Dual 2.5...get a Quad with the NVidia GeForce 7800 GT upgrade card (check Barefeats.com for test results). This machine smokes.

- Joey



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

> Unfortunately, if you export a quicktime movie first before going to
> compressor, you won't be able to carry your chapter markers over to DVDSP.

That's not the case with my home system (FCP4.5/Compressor/DVDSP3). Could it be a Compressor 2 "improvement"? Conversely, since my "Export Using Compressor" FCP function doesn't work, exporting a movie file first is the only option for me.

Can't they come up with options that work!?

> I moved it over to my new Quad 2.5 with the same AE software & plug-ins
> = 16 minutes for the exact same project.

Rub it in, Joe...rub it in. |}

YaHoo! How much RAM do you have in your Quad. Just got mine with the 6600 default card it it. 4.5 GB RAM and still building it up.

Bearfeats showns AE and a couple of other programs that actually take advantage of 4 CPU's where others don't.

"Unfortunately, if you export a quicktime movie first before going to compressor, you won't be able to carry your chapter markers over to DVDSP"

sure you will.

just make sure you ask for them.
there is a "markers" pulldown menu in the "export QuickTime Movie" dialogue box.
make sure you select either "Chapter Markers" or "All DVDSP Markers"

now if you were exporting with QuickTime Conversion, then that's another thing.
i dont think the marker options are there.
but that would give you another compression hit, so you wouldn't be doing that anyway...

nick

Are you saying that self contained FCP quicktimes retain their chapter markers after being run through compressor 2? That's great news. I'm still on 1.2.1. I think I tried upgrading once, but had issues where Compressor wouldn't even work, so I jumped through a bunch of hoops to get it back to a working config.

Everything works great for me, except for this wierd issue where compressor crashes when I submit the file to the batch monitor. More of an annoyance than a problem since the encoding still happens, but I never got an answer from Apple about what was causing it.

Andy

Actually Nick, I've done this test several times and with my version of Compressor, I won't get chapter markers unless I export using compressor straight out of FCP. Quicktime movies (not quicktime conversion) with chapter markers selected in either reference or self-contained movies never works.

It used to drive me up a wall until I tried compressing through FCP once for the helluvit. I just figured it was bug in the program. Now I don't know what to think.

andy