OT: Video rendering speed in Sony Movie Studio

[Ed.Kloonk]

I feel your pain with that rotten stream nonsense format on the sdcard from your camcorder
That file format. Why? 

It's standard-ish AVCHD, like used on most similar camcorders.

Pile of crap is what it is. The camcoder I was working on had nasty forced interlacing issues. Because the cam could output straight to the composite video cable, I presume. Isn't encoding in interlaced format a bit old fashioned now? Even my GoPro can output a tv and not having to save the file in interlaced.

Sorry for hijack. 

Ah. Oki Dokie. Got it.

That's what most people don't understand. I do things the way I do because I produce HD content and I do not have unlimited upload bandwidth, and I do it daily. File size, and extracting the best possible image quality for that given file size is everything. Hence my obsession with Constant Quality format encoders like x264 in Handbrake.

I understand using GoPro video shot in HD for posterity and bringing it all home to edit but trying to send just a few minutes of something while on the go and fit it in Gmail's 25meg file limit. All on the aforementioned clunker computer. The newer cam firmware can shoot two modes simultaneous but the low res is hopeless, and buggy.

I dunno Dave. There's a market there for a tiny hardware simple solution. Invent it and you'll be farting though silk mate.

[ve7xen]

That's what most people don't understand. I do things the way I do because I produce HD content and I do not have unlimited upload bandwidth, and I do it daily. File size, and extracting the best possible image quality for that given file size is everything. Hence my obsession with Constant Quality format encoders like x264 in Handbrake.

You should really find a workflow that lets you skip the intermediate encoding step, I think. It's definitely possible, if (for some unknown reason) unpopular among video types. One option that's a bit less efficient would be to go from Vegas to a very fast intermdiate codec (like MJPEG, to choose a free and well supported example) at high bitrate, then transcode that back down to h.264 with x264 as the final step. You'll probably be limited by disk I/O on the encode, so your CPU and GPU don't really matter until the x264 stage; it should be much faster than realtime on a modern machine. Problem is you need a relative shitton of hard disk space and it's still an unnecessary intermediate step.

[EEVblog]

You should really find a workflow that lets you skip the intermediate encoding step, I think. It's definitely possible, if (for some unknown reason) unpopular among video types. One option that's a bit less efficient would be to go from Vegas to a very fast intermdiate codec (like MJPEG, to choose a free and well supported example) at high bitrate, then transcode that back down to h.264 with x264 as the final step.

I've tried all the encoders in Sony and the Sony AVC one is the quickest.
Yes, ideally I'd like to encode directly from Sony to constant quality x264.

The FinalCut/Mac solution with the Matrox board sound really good, but is a complete unknown and expensive solution.
I'd probably have to get a 2nd hand mac pro for that.

[peter.mitchell]

Do you know if the lab desktop pc has a PCI-E slot and how good the power supply is? I can send you a Ati HD 5870 (very high computer performance for their age) I have sitting around and you can give that a whirl if you wish, so you can try some stuff, i guess?

[mikeselectricstuff]

Just having a play around - I got frameserver to work with Vegas first time, no problem at all - saw some comments online that there are issues if you install FS while vegas is still running.
Couldn't get Handbrake to work with it, but seems a common problem and many people prefer MeGUI.
Did a quick test with an existing vid and seems to work OK - not done a comparative timing but speed feels  similar to vegas normal AVC rendering.
There are gazillions of tweakable options in MeGui so probably all sorts of scope for optimising.

 Definitely worth persuing!

[free_electron]

You may want to look at this too :

http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/Turbo264HD/product1.en.html

Works on mac. One guy sent the same source through HandBrake and the Turb264.... Handbrake 4 hours. Turbo264. 37 minutes...

99$....

Takes 1.3 minutes to encode a 12 minute video... Thats waaaaay faster than realtime.

[mariush]

But the quality goes through the floor.

It probably uses the same kind of hardware encoder used on hd webcams and tv tuners. 

[EEVblog]

Just having a play around - I got frameserver to work with Vegas first time, no problem at all - saw some comments online that there are issues if you install FS while vegas is still running.

Well, I'm using Sony MovieStudio, not Sony Vegas, maybe that's the issue?
Still can't get ti to work on my lab machine either.
Have installed in the FileIO plugin directory and still no joy.

[EEVblog]

Do you know if the lab desktop pc has a PCI-E slot and how good the power supply is? I can send you a Ati HD 5870 (very high computer performance for their age) I have sitting around and you can give that a whirl if you wish, so you can try some stuff, i guess?

I have PCI-e x1, x8, and x16 slots in a Dell XPS 420
Currently running a 256MB Nvideo GeForce 8600 GTS card in the x16 slot. It's pretty piss-poor, no GPU support in Sony.
So yeah, if you aren't using it, I'll take that card, thanks.

[peter.mitchell]

I'll wrap it up and send it on it's way.

[EEVblog]

I'll wrap it up and send it on it's way.

Cool, thanks!

BTW, I got Debugmode Frame Server installed finally and showing up as render option under Movie Studio, but it just sits there, does nothing 

[ve7xen]

BTW, I got Debugmode Frame Server installed finally and showing up as render option under Movie Studio, but it just sits there, does nothing 

You do understand the concept, right? . It will sit there and do nothing until you open the signpost file in your encoding program and it starts requesting frames.

[mikeselectricstuff]

Just used frameserver to render a 25 min vid to H.264- took about 2x real time, which is definitely faster than Sony AVC. 
File came out a bit big, but I just used the default settings in MeGUI so will need to do some playing with quality settings. 

[EEVblog]

Just used frameserver to render a 25 min vid to H.264- took about 2x real time, which is definitely faster than Sony AVC. 
File came out a bit big, but I just used the default settings in MeGUI so will need to do some playing with quality settings.

How did you output H.264? I presume you shoot in H.264? as the job of FrameServer is to simply output the same format as your source files, right?

[EEVblog]

BTW, I got Debugmode Frame Server installed finally and showing up as render option under Movie Studio, but it just sits there, does nothing 

You do understand the concept, right? . It will sit there and do nothing until you open the signpost file in your encoding program and it starts requesting frames.

Well, in Sony I select FrameServer as  the codec and I hit the "Render" button. Sony starts to render and the FrameServeer window just sits there and does nothing. I can't do or open anything in Sony until that ends!
perhaps I am doing something stupid? 

[mariush]

You have to open that avi file that's listed in the frameserver window with another application with support for x264, like MeGUI: http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui/

MeGUI will see the avi file as basically an uncompressed HD video, and will compress that to mp4 (using x264) with the quality settings you choose.

Maybe handbrake will also open that fake avi video file, but I haven't tested it yet so I couldn't tell you.

[mikeselectricstuff]

BTW, I got Debugmode Frame Server installed finally and showing up as render option under Movie Studio, but it just sits there, does nothing 

You do understand the concept, right? . It will sit there and do nothing until you open the signpost file in your encoding program and it starts requesting frames.

Well, in Sony I select FrameServer as  the codec and I hit the "Render" button. Sony starts to render and the FrameServeer window just sits there and does nothing. I can't do or open anything in Sony until that ends!
perhaps I am doing something stupid? 

yes..... AFAIUI, the idea is that Vegas thinks it's talking to a filesystem to write an uncompressed AVI file, and the video encoder thinks it's reading from a real file, but the file is a dummy, and frameserver just passes data directly from one task to the other.
I don't quite understand how it handles seeks within the file, but it does - I can open the dummy AVI in VirtualDub and scroll around it
.
 

[EEVblog]

Right, obvious once you know...
Handbrake doesn't work, does not open the .avi file
Tried MeGui and it opens the .avi file and displays a screen grab (wrong aspect ratio), but I get an error when I go to render

[EEVblog]

yes..... AFAIUI, the idea is that Vegas thinks it's talking to a filesystem to write an uncompressed AVI file

That's what I thought it did, just wrote to an uncompressed avi file!
I don't see why it can't simply do that instead of having to feed it into a program

[EEVblog]

If I play the preview window in MeGui then Frameserver starts to work on Sony, but only at 40% real time which is very slow.

[mariush]

The preview window is not representative of how that software works. The renderer is slow.
Once you start the encoding, all the work is done in the background by x264 and the audio encoder.

Don't know what to say, maybe you didn't install MeGUI properly?  Did you install AviSynth as it said during installation, did you accept to install those presets during autoupdate? etc etc...
The whole installation is not that user-friendly, I'll admit.

Also, it's not really relevant that the image is distorted in the preview window. You should be able to give the application a "hint' as to what aspect ratio is the correct one in that preview window, but basically the encoder will encode 1440x1080 and the proper aspect ratio is generally saved in the container used (mp4 or mkv), not in the video stream, so it can be corrected later on even if it's incorrectly set by MeGUI.

later edit: and don't put down the application if it's slow on the first tests, you really have to go and check  the x264 settings/profile and tweak it to get to where you were in handbrake.

[EEVblog]

Don't know what to say, maybe you didn't install MeGUI properly?  Did you install AviSynth as it said during installation, did you accept to install those presets during autoupdate? etc etc...
The whole installation is not that user-friendly, I'll admit.

It was a ZIP file. I unzipped it and ran it 
I had no idea about AVIsynth...

later edit: and don't put down the application if it's slow on the first tests, you really have to go and check  the x264 settings/profile and tweak it to get to where you were in handbrake.

Yes, Handbrake and the x264 options is something I know well.

[ve7xen]

That's what I thought it did, just wrote to an uncompressed avi file!
I don't see why it can't simply do that instead of having to feed it into a program

You can do this, but then the I/O bandwidth requirement is huge. Uncompressed video is truly gargantuan, for 720p30 you're talking about more than 100MB/s. A decent hard drive these days is about that fast, so you're capped at realtime by that alone, and when it's done you still have to encode it, which is again limited to realtime by the I/O performance. There are lossless encoders you can use to mitigate this some, but they only compress by 2-5x, so you're still probably I/O bound and get huge files. Of course you could use a RAID or whatnot to speed it up, but why bother when you can just shuffle the data as needed between programs, it'll always be faster.

If you didn't install AviSynth with MeGUI, you definitely need that, it handles all the behind-the-scenes video processing that MeGUI does and needs a system install to work, which obviously can't be in a zip file .

[EEVblog]

Installed AVIsynth, and still the same error.
There does not appear to be anything to run with AVIsynth?
How many hoops do I have to jump through? 

[ve7xen]

Installed AVIsynth, and still the same error.
There does not appear to be anything to run with AVIsynth?

AviSynth is sort of like a library. It installs media handlers and some other stuff into the OS's codec stack. You can write an AviSynth script and should be able to open it in any media player / editor that uses the Windows video stack. There's no program.

I'm not sure what's gone wrong. It's not a trivial install, there's a bunch of dependencies and nobody has packaged it all up easily, but it should all work if you get everything installed.

One thing you could try is to set up the AviSynth script in MeGUI, then just save the .avs file somewhere and try opening it with e.g. VirtualDub or Media Player Classic and see if it works. If that's okay, I think MeGUI should work even if the preview doesn't. Try rendering a short clip and see what happens.

As far as hoops - ask Sony why this functionality isn't built-in .